What’s Up Below?
Publication Design
What’s Up Below? What’s going on down there?
This seasonal subterranean subscription aims to answer those questions by curating and providing examples of the most interesting specimens that come from beneath the earth.
Created for this project was a double-header issue - a single magazine with two feature topics - complete with articles, quick facts, and interactive activities all about gemstones and fossils.
Intended for bright young learners in an academic scientific field, What’s Up Below? must be scholarly enough to be endorsed by scholastic programming, while also being witty and zany enough to capture the attention of a middle school audience.
The subscription does not just include the magazine issues, but also objects for hands-on learning:
Specimens of fossils and gemstones that can be identified by the reader using a provided field guide.
Custom leather gloves to encourage excavation.
A jeweler’s loupe to help the reader inspect gemstones. One lucky issue of Gemstones includes a real diamond: the rest include cubic zirconium. The reader can appraise their “diamond” using techniques within the issue.