Designing Literature

After we developed a website for the women writers’ collective Madrigalit, their founder returned to us for help to create an online literary journal. Varying the name of their company—and still playing with the word “madrigal,” which is also the founder’s surname—we titled the new journal Madrigalia, delightfully invoking, again, the notion of a free-style song for many voices. The new but similar name enabled us to use the original logotype for the collective, making just a small, whimsical twist to differentiate it for their blog.

Drawing from the writers’ collective’s original branding for Madrigalit, we customized a new logotype for their online literary journal, Madrigalia.

Along with creating the graphic design for their new journal, we also helped to develop a content system for it, including such categories as “A Writer’s Life,” “Interviews,” “Fictions,” “Rough Drafts,” and more. We also created a style guide to help make each article feel consistent with the magazine as a whole, including word and image counts and recommendations for links and pull quotes. As designers of whatever type, we remain acutely sensitive to the needs of a user by creating clarity, consistency, and simplicity across all modes, be they visual, literary, or otherwise.

Madrigalia features fictional stories, essays about writing, interviews, and more. The journal is created with spaciousness and flexibility so it grows alongside the writers’ inspiration and creativity.

We also wanted to make the journal easy to use for the writers, who would be adding their content after our original structure was completed. The blog’s scaffolding is incredibly user friendly, and there is ample room for it to grow to encompass more articles and stories—and, importantly, it can also be transformed to include new organizational systems, in case the writers have fresh ideas in the future, which is almost certain to occur with this or any creative endeavor. If you’d like to see their blog in its current iteration, click here, but be sure to check in often, as we imagine their stories will be growing more quickly than ever now that they have a cleanly designed set of containers for their work.