The 30-second version
Octavo is a concept reading product for people who still want to read long things. It does three things differently. Editorial typography in code. A sidebar that summarizes only when asked. An “adapted to you” line that’s honest about why.
Naming
The size of a real book
Octavo — a book size, roughly 6×9 inches. A printer takes a single sheet, folds it three times, and gets eight leaves: an octavo. It’s the size of most novels you actually read. The name is a commitment: a reading product designed to feel like a book in your hand, not a feed.
Problem
Reading apps stopped designing the page.
Most reading products are content shells. Same typography across every article. Same UI chrome on top. The actual reading experience, the thing the user is there for, is treated as a commodity.
Print magazines spent a century building a discipline around the page. Online reading dropped most of it. I wanted to put it back.
Approach
Design the page first. Treat the app as the binding.
Library
A weekday view, not a feed
No infinite scroll. The library shows what you saved and where you are in it. The dot system reads at a glance: filled is unread, half-filled is in progress, empty is finished.
Tuesday morning · 4 things you saved
Your library
The trouble with productivity
The Atlantic · 22 min
A defense of the long sentence
LARB · 14 min
How a print magazine reinvents itself
Eye on Design · 9 min
On craft
The Paris Review · 31 min
Reading
Sidebar as a quiet companion
The sidebar only fills in when the user asks for it. Summary is opt-in, not auto-generated. The “why you” line tells the truth about why the recommendation appeared (you read three Annals pieces last month). No black box.
Annals of Inquiry
What we lose when we stop reading slowly
On the quiet costs of skimming, and the case for the deliberate page.
For most of the past decade, the conventional wisdom in publishing was that attention was a finite resource being drained by every new feed. What the new research suggests is something stranger.
Attention isn't being drained. It's being trained, badly, into a posture of constant ranking.
The eye learns to assess every paragraph for whether it is worth the next one. The mind learns to read in defense.
Long-form reading view · desktop
Type system
Five sizes. One rule.
Type tokens scale with the article, not with viewport. Long pieces get a slightly larger body. Short pieces stay tighter. Reading rhythm is preserved.
display.serif · 48/52
On craft.
h2.serif · 28/32
What the research found
lede.italic · 17/24
A note from the editor.
body.serif · 16/28
Reading is a posture, not a task. You either lean in or you skim.
caption.sans · 11/16
Annals of Inquiry
Mobile
Same discipline on small screens
Single progress rail at the foot of the page. Replaces the chrome of a typical reading app.
What I'd do next
A history view
The current product helps you read what you saved. The piece I haven't designed yet is what happens after. A history view that surfaces the lines you highlighted, the pieces you returned to, the writers you keep coming back to. Not analytics. A bookshelf.
That's where Octavo earns its name. Eight leaves, folded once, bound — surfaced back to you a week later.