Groundbreakers

Prologis is the largest owner of logistics real estate on the planet, warehouses, distribution centers, the physical bones of how goods move. The kind of company that, by default, gets rendered in slide decks and quarterly reports. The kind of subject matter you'd expect to see in a B2B trade magazine, not in something you'd actually want to read.

The brief, alongside Edelman, was to build the opposite: a true editorial product about commercial real estate and global logistics. Long features. Named-source interviews. Original illustration. The look and feel of Wired or Monocle, applied to an industry nobody normally treats as worth that level of design attention.

The proof the brief was real: Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, sat for an interview about supply chain. The CEO of Prologis, Hamid Moghadam, wrote the editor's letter. When the journalism shows up, the design has to meet it.

Six of us total at Edelman: four designers, one illustrator, one project manager. Editorial team on the Prologis side. The illustration system, the photo-meets-watercolor portrait language that became the magazine's signature, was its own discipline, handled by our illustrator. Our role sat next to that, on the structural side of the magazine.

Built the page layouts. Profile features, article pages, the home grid, the contact pages. The shape of how a story actually reads on screen.

Helped design the brand system. The wordmark logic, the typographic ramp, the way the lime-green accent threads through the cream/charcoal palette without ever taking over.

Made on-page graphics and infographics. The supporting visuals that turn a 1,500-word feature on supply-chain resilience into something a reader will actually finish.

Refined the navigation. A 20-page microsite that has to read like a magazine, not a sitemap, how a reader moves between issues, departments, and individual features.

The work below is the magazine as it shipped. The illustration system that runs through every portrait page was built by our illustrator; everything around it (the layouts those portraits sit inside, the typographic system holding the story, the supporting graphics on the page) is where we worked.

Issue cover, editor's letter, the Groundbreakers feature, supply-chain reportage, profile interviews, infographics, indices, contact. Above: the home grid and a few pages from the issue.

Each one is the kind of decision that's invisible when it works and obvious when it doesn't.

The wordmark earned the magazine the right to feel like a magazine. A weak logo would have collapsed the editorial intent inside the first scroll. The compressed-sans GROUNDBREAKERS with the lime-green broken K is doing real work, it's confident enough to sit above named-source journalism without apologizing for the topic.

The portrait illustration system, built by our illustrator, is the magazine's actual signature. Photographic likeness inside a sketched, watercolor-splashed treatment, with the same green and teal threading through every face. It's editorial in the way a New Yorker illustration is editorial: it tells you this is a publication, not a product page.

The three-color palette holds the whole thing. Cream ground, charcoal type, lime accent. No gradients, no auxiliary colors stepping in to liven things up. Restraint reads as confidence; confidence reads as this is a real magazine.

And the layout system, the part we built, sequences the magazine the way a printed issue sequences itself. Cover. Editor's letter. The flagship feature (Meet the 14). Reportage. Profile interviews. Infographics. Index. Every page knows where it sits in the issue, and every page reads like the next one is worth scrolling to.

We made the room they showed up to.

Most B2B publishing is a content marketing brief in editorial costume, the structure of an article wrapped around the same call-to-action that sits on a sales page. Groundbreakers wasn't that. It got Pete Buttigieg on the record. The CEO of Prologis writing a real editor's letter. Long-form features about supply-chain resilience that hold up next to actual culture publishing.

Design's job inside that is to not be the weakest part. To meet the journalism. To make the room feel like the conversation worth being in. That's the bar editorial design has to clear, and that's what this work was reaching for.

Note: Groundbreakers has continued to evolve since this issue shipped, the live site has had subsequent design updates. The work captured here is the original system as built.

See the live site ↗