Real content, trapped in
undesigned production.
A chairman’s letter that reads like a filing. A textbook nobody can find anything in. A member magazine that couldn’t hold a schedule. A registry holding twenty-five years of data that nobody can look a single number up in. We find the substance already there, and design it to be read. Everything below is on this page — you shouldn’t have to go hunting for the work.
Somewhere between “written” and “filed,” the story gets lost.
Statutory and compliance-driven documents almost always contain real content — a chairman’s letter, an R&D story, a genuine point of view — sitting inside production built only to satisfy a regulator, not a reader. We separate the two: designing the narrative sections to be read, while the statutory sections still do their job.
A narrative annual report, not a compliance filing.
Full annual report design — narrative sections built to be read, impact data built to be scanned, statutory content present but visually subordinate.
Art Director: Subhojit Sanyal. Designed at Storytellers, prior to the founding of Subhojit For Sale.
A textbook is not a long magazine. Nobody reads it front to back.
Reference publishing is its own discipline. A clinician arrives with a specific question and needs the answer without reading the forty pages before it — so the contents page has to work as an index, tables need whole pages rather than the space left over, and figures have to be sized to be diagnostic rather than decorative. We design the navigation as carefully as the prose, because in a reference work the navigation is what gets used.
Two reference works, two different problems.
Outbreaks of Infectious Conjunctivitis is a reference volume, built to be searched: three tiers of contents, every subsection listed, comparison tables given full pages. DISC-OS is a practical manual for operating theatres, built to be used standing up — chapter openers as arrival points, protocols on their own pages, and a handwashing sequence designed to be photographed and stuck above a sink. Both: full interior layout and print-ready production, with sponsor advertising placed outside the editorial block.
Service manuals built for the technician, not the archive.
Technical and scientific manuals for an industrial manufacturer: specification tables, a supplier directory, and a fault-finding protocol. The constraint was a technician with oily hands and poor light who needs a torque figure in seconds — which drove the table structure, the typographic hierarchy at small sizes on cheap stock, and a navigation system that works whether the manual is read front to back or opened at random. Contact details in the directory are obscured here; those are real people at real suppliers.
Art Director: Subhojit Sanyal. Designed at Storytellers, prior to the founding of Subhojit For Sale.
Two books in one spine, made to stop fighting each other.
Institutional books usually carry more than one kind of writing — scholarship and story, archive and argument — and the temptation is to flatten them into a single treatment. We do the opposite: give each register its own signal, so a reader always knows which one they are in without being told.
An anthology and an academic volume, sharing one book.
Folklore from across the subcontinent alongside scholarly essays on what a folk tale is and what happens to it under Sanskritisation, tourism and neglect. Each essay opens on a full-page commissioned illustration — Madhubani birds, a Kashmiri miniature, a Gond roundel — because the artwork is the signal that a new voice has started. The archival section runs on a warmer paper tone: a shift in stock rather than a shift in design, so you know you have crossed into older material without anyone telling you. Published, launched and in distribution.
A publication your members actually look forward to.
A member magazine or newsletter that exists because it has to, rather than because anyone treats it as communication, is a missed opportunity — for member engagement, and for the sponsorship revenue a well-produced publication can earn on its own merit.
From stalled newsletter to a publication members expect.
A member magazine for a society of 26,000+ ophthalmologists, rebuilt with a real design system and a cadence that has not slipped since January 2024 — ten consecutive issues, the eleventh underway. In 2026 it opened to paid advertising, which turns a publication from a cost the society carries into an asset that pays for itself. We run the social programme for it too, built from the magazine’s own named sections rather than as issue announcements.
Nobody reads a data book. They arrive looking for one number.
Design development · Collaboration
A registry, a census, a trial summary, an outcomes report — these are read the way a dictionary is read. Someone arrives with a question, and the design either answers it in ten seconds or sends them back to the spreadsheet. So the contents page has to double as an index, every chapter has to behave identically to the one before it, and a chart has to be legible enough that a clinician will cite it rather than recalculate it.
One template, recoloured per cancer site, so every chapter reads the same way.
A 136-page hospital cancer registry covering 1996–2021, structured in four parts: the institution, the leading cancers site by site, then the full tables and figures. The navigation does the work — a three-tier contents that functions as an index, full-bleed part dividers so you always know which of the four you are in, and a single chapter template reissued in a different colour for each cancer site, so a reader who has understood one chapter has understood all twenty. Charts were drawn to be read at a glance and cited without conversion; the table section was set to hold a full year-by-year series on one page rather than break across three.
Design development. Shown as designed by SFS — not as an account of the published report.
Designed by Subhojit For Sale as design collaborator to Petridish Media, the commissioned agency. Shown as design development.
Built for organisations that publish on a schedule, not just once.
Brief & content audit
Understand what’s genuinely narrative versus genuinely statutory or structural.
Design system
Built once, reused every cycle, so consistency doesn’t depend on which designer is free that quarter.
Production & handoff
Print-ready and digital-ready from the same system.
Ongoing cadence support
Not a one-off project relationship — the AIOS model: a quarterly, two textbooks, and the social programme, all off one system.