Noir Press
- —Editorial Design
- —Art Direction
- —Print Production
- —Digital Edition
- —Subscription Design
Noir Press publishes photography books and independent journalism. They needed a visual system that could hold its own in a bookshop, on a screen, and in the hands of someone who takes reading seriously.
Independent publishers are dying because they're trying to compete with attention — more colour, more stimulation, faster content. Noir Press wanted to go the other way: slower, denser, darker. Content for people who want to actually read something.
PRINT IS A COMMITMENT
We built the system around a strict 8-column grid across all formats — A4 for long-form journalism, A5 for photography books, and a custom 16:9 ratio for the digital edition. One grid, three formats.
THE QUIET POWER OF A GOOD FACE
The typographic system uses three faces across two families. Body text is set in a Dutch serif — low contrast, high legibility, designed for long reading. Display type uses a grotesque cut from 1964 that's never been digitised cleanly until now.
— Priya Okafor, UX LeadThe best reading experiences feel inevitable. Like someone made all the decisions before you arrived and everything is exactly where it should be.
IMAGES FIRST, ALWAYS
For the photography books, the text is secondary. We built a layout system where images bleed and the text exists only as context — caption sizes reduced by 30%, caption column width fixed at 48mm regardless of spread size.
The photography edition sold out its first print run of 500 copies in 11 days. The second run sold through pre-order before shipping.
RESEARCH
Twelve weeks started with two weeks reading everything Noir Press had published. We built a vocabulary of visual decisions they'd made intuitively — then gave them a system for those decisions.
SYSTEM
Grid, type scale, image treatment, caption rules, folio system, cover design — documented in a 60-page production guide that covers offset, digital, and web output.
PRODUCTION
We art-directed all four print runs, working directly with the printer in Ghent on paper selection, binding, and colour proofing. Print is craft.