Case study — Marrow & Press
Reading like an heirloom
Marrow & Press asked for a website. We ended up redesigning the object the website was selling.
- Client
- Marrow & Press
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Brand & web
- Discipline
- Brand, Editorial, Web
- Read
- 2 min read
Marrow & Press publishes four essays a year, bound by hand, on paper you can feel through the shipping envelope. Their readers are not in a hurry. Their website, unfortunately, was: four columns, three carousels, and a footer that could seat eight.
We pulled the site apart down to the masthead and rebuilt it around a single question: what would reading about these books feel like if the site itself were a book?
“For the first time the site looks like the thing we make, not like the thing we’re afraid people need.
”
The brief
The constraint was ruthless: no stock photography, no lifestyle imagery, no rotating banners. The site had to do its job in typography, whitespace, and restraint. The catalog is small — we treated that as an asset, not a problem to pad around.
The work
01/Audit
Fewer columns
Every page collapsed to a single reading measure. Nav moved into a colophon. The catalog became a masthead.
02/System
One face, three voices
Fraunces everywhere — display for covers, text for body, mono for apparatus. One font family, three distinct moods.
03/Handover
An editor-ready CMS
Markdown files in a GitHub repo, committed by the editorial team without a middleman.
The results
Email subscribers
in the year after launch
Direct-to-cart conversion
Stock photos used
Marrow & Press now publishes directly from their repo. Every issue ships with a web edition that reads like a preview of the printed object, which was the only goal that mattered.