05 / 06 — CASE STUDY
Brine
ROLE: Editorial Designer / DISCIPLINE: Editorial / Typography / Layout / TOOLS: Affinity / Illustrator / Photoshop / YEAR: 2026
01 / OVERVIEW
I created brine: a coastal food and culture magazine. This publication captures the messy, social, slightly chaotic joy of eating seafood with friends. The goal was to build a publication that’s smart about food without taking itself too seriously, with a cover system flexible enough to feel fresh every issue but instantly recognizable on a shelf.
02 / THE CHALLENGE
Curate, research, and design a hypothetical magazine.
03 / PROCESS
Inspiration and exploration
04 / FINAL WORK
Brine spans three issues, each built around a single theme, from the merroir of the bay’s oysters to a backyard lobster boil to the deep end of crab season. Every cover gets its own palette and illustrated scene, while a consistent system ties the series together: a bold, rounded wordmark, an elegant serif for cover lines, and a fixed structure for issue details. Inside, “Chesapeake Comeback” shows how that voice carries into long-form editorial, pairing photography with a restrained type system and generous pacing.
05 / OUTCOME
Brine came together as a complete editorial concept: a quarterly magazine with its own identity, voice, and visual system. The project pushed me into territory where rendering couldn’t do the heavy lifting. Every page depended on typography, grid, and pacing: setting a clear hierarchy from headline to caption, balancing image-led layouts against long-form text, and building small details like folios, running heads, and photo credits that make a magazine feel real. It also became a lesson in editing my own work, as early drafts went through rounds of refinement to fix text flow, justification, and alignment until the spreads held together.