Horizon Magazine

The problem

Horizon had eleven years of print issues people kept on their shelves, and a website that looked like a news aggregator. The editor’s fear was reasonable: every magazine that had gone online in their category had come out the other side looking like every other magazine in their category.

Photography was not an option — the budget had never stretched to it, which is exactly why the print edition had always been illustrated.

What we did

We treated illustration as a system rather than a series of commissions. Three hues, a fixed layering logic — foreground, ridge, sky — and a set of rules about depth that hold whether the result is a full-bleed cover or a sixty-pixel thumbnail in a list.

The point was never to draw eleven covers. It was to leave behind a method the in-house designer could follow on a Tuesday afternoon with a deadline.

• The system — layer rules, a fixed palette, and worked examples at four sizes.
• The layouts — an article template that survives a 4,000-word essay and a 400-word note.
• The training — two sessions, recorded, plus the source files for every illustration we made.

What changed

Horizon has illustrated four covers since without us. The palette survived contact with a print run, which is where most screen-first systems fall over — the three hues were chosen against coated stock from the first week.