Pocket Notes: Two Days with Sylwia & Simon
Client:
Cro+Kow
Brief:
To explore how publishing might evolve within a circular, low-impact future, we initiated a two-day creative residency with collaborators, members and friends Sylwia Kowalczyk and Simon Crofts. The intention was to interrogate what we keep, what we pass on and what forms our creative legacy when traditional print processes are stripped back.
As a team, we gathered in Sylwia & Simon’s studio to collaborate on Sylwia’s Speculations project and test how far we could push a magazine before it is no longer considered to be a magazine. Following on from our two days with Sylwia & Simon, we were tasked with creating a unique publication to document our findings. Instead of producing a polished publication, the brief called for a rapid, instinctive piece that captured the energy of the experience itself – a record of conversations shared, sketches doodled, recipes discussed, questions posed and observations generated in real time.
The aim was to create a publication that functioned almost like a field diary: a distilled snapshot of boom saloon’s ethos, internal thinking and cultural DNA, produced with minimal waste and maximum candour. We created a small, hand-finished zine that demonstrated the principles of circularity through its very construction. The publication was created from a single sheet of paper, cut and folded into form without binding or excess materials, and completed within an intentionally constrained 25-hour window.
Unedited and unproofed by design, the zine had to embrace imperfection as method, allowing spontaneity, constraint and material limitation to shape both content and form. The final piece serves not as a traditional magazine, but as a raw, intimate artefact; proof that sustainable publishing can be playful, immediate and deeply human when process, concept and material are brought into alignment.
Services:
Branding, Graphic Design, Publication Design, Editing, Print Management
Specification:
Full, 594 mm × 841 mm; Folded, 126 mm × 176 mm
Typefaces:
Neue Haas Grotesk, Christian Schwartz; Consolas, Luc(as) de Groot; Editorial New, Pangram Pangram; Times New Roman, Monotype
Stock:
Uncoated, 170gsm
To explore how publishing might evolve within a circular, low-impact future, we initiated a two-day creative residency with collaborators, members and friends Sylwia Kowalczyk and Simon Crofts. The residency interrogated fundamental questions about what we keep, what we pass on and what forms a creative legacy when traditional print processes are stripped back. The goal was to experiment with publishing processes that reduce waste while retaining spontaneity, energy and human connection.
We gathered in Sylwia & Simon’s studio to collaborate on Sylwia’s Speculations project, using imperfect copies of boom saloon to explore questions around what we keep vs what we pass on; what we leave as our legacy; when a magazine is no longer a magazine; how we move to a fully circular publishing model and, pressingly, what we contribute vs what we take from our world. Following the residency, we were tasked with creating a publication that captured the process truthfully. The result, Pocket Notes, is a 16-page, 126x176mm zine created in 25 hours. Printed on a single sheet of paper, cut and folded by hand without binding or excess materials, it demonstrates circularity in both process and material. [Almost fully] unedited and unproofed, the publication embraces imperfection as method, allowing constraint, spontaneity and material limitation to shape content and form.
Inside, Pocket Notes presents an eclectic, immediate record of conversations, sketches, recipes, illustrations, playlists and observations – a distilled snapshot of boom saloon’s ethos, internal thinking and cultural DNA. It functions as a raw, intimate artefact; proof that sustainable publishing can be playful, immediate and deeply human when process, concept and material are in alignment.
Pocket Notes exemplifies our commitment to pushing the boundaries of print, marrying conceptual design with social and environmental responsibility. By exploring circular publishing in practice, the project highlights our studio’s ability to create publications that are bold, experimental and socially conscious while questioning conventional approaches to production, consumption and creative legacy.
The residency reinforced our positioning as a studio that champions non-traditional, concept-driven print projects, demonstrating that sustainable publishing can be innovative, human-centred and culturally resonant. It also provided a replicable model for low-impact, experimental publishing that aligns with our work to use paper and ink for social change.
