Identity for a press that prints books on actual paper

Field Notes Press came to us with a name, a shed full of paper, and a manuscript ready to ship. They’d been printing under a different name for two years and wanted to relaunch with a brand that matched the books — small-format, careful, slightly old-fashioned.

The brief

Build a brand for a small-batch press that publishes 3-4 titles per year. The brand needs to live across print (the books themselves, packaging, postcards, errata sheets) and screen (a marketing site with a small Shopify integration). The owner is a former editor and a former typographer; she will notice everything.

What we did

The wordmark is a hand-revised version of Caslon Doric, the doric / sans-serif companion to the venerable Caslon serif family. We pulled the mark down to a tight cap-height letterspacing, added a hairline horizontal rule above and below, and applied the rule consistently across book covers, packaging, and the site footer.

The color is a single warm cream #E8E1D5 paper stock matched to the actual paper of Volume 01, with a deep walnut #3F2E1E for type. There’s no third color in the system. The type pairing is Caslon Doric for display and Caslon Pro for body, including in the books themselves.

The packaging is two SKUs: a kraft mailer with a printed wrap, and a presentation box for hardback editions. Both reuse the wordmark + horizontal rule pattern with no decoration.

The marketing site is intentionally small — one page, the catalog, a long colophon page, a bio. The Shopify integration runs on subdomain shop.fnp.press so the marketing site stays static and unhurried.

The outcome

Volume 01 sold out in 11 days. Volume 02 sold out in 8. Volume 03 is currently shipping. The press is in its fourth volume and the system has expanded slightly — a Substack newsletter, a postcard subscription series — but the wordmark, color, and type are unchanged.

Their owner has bought us drinks twice. We don’t normally count that as an outcome, but it tracks.