The brief

Field Notes Press came to me with a familiar problem: a product that had grown by accretion, one urgent feature at a time. The goal was not a facelift. It was to find the one sentence the product should say, and remove everything that contradicted it.

What we did

Six weeks of interviews, a week of whiteboard silence, then a prototype every Friday. We tested in the wild instead of the lab, and let the numbers argue with our opinions. Art direction, Typography, iOS — in roughly that order.

Outcome

The shipped work is quieter than what came before, and it does more. Fewer screens, clearer defaults, and a system the in-house team now extends without me. That last part is the result I am proudest of.