Fieldwork

Fieldwork is a publishing concept for a small editorial team. The brief was to make a place for essays, interviews and photographic stories while keeping the day-to-day publishing process understandable for editors.

Start with the reading experience

I worked from real draft stories rather than placeholder headlines. Their different lengths exposed the decisions a template needs to handle: a title that wraps onto three lines, a photograph with a long caption, an interview broken into many short exchanges.

The reading layout uses a restrained measure, responsive imagery and a small set of editorial blocks. Navigation stays out of the text column. Related stories appear after the article, where they provide a useful next step without competing with the current one.

Give editors useful constraints

The Laravel content model separates stories, contributors and issues. A Vue editor presents a short set of composable blocks instead of a blank page with dozens of formatting controls. Captions and alternative text sit beside the image they describe, so they are part of publishing rather than a later checklist.

Preview uses the same rendering components as the published story. That removes a common source of uncertainty: an editor can assess the actual text wrapping and image treatment before publishing, including on a narrow screen.

Adding new story formats

A deliberately small block vocabulary made the system easier to discuss with editors. New story formats can grow from the existing components. The next step would be a full editorial rehearsal, from an imported draft through correction and publication, to find the gaps that a polished preview cannot show.