At Obox we are incredibly passionate about design. We spend hours every morning catching up on design news, design showcases, design articles and more.

That being said, we believe you cannot have good design without good copy. It’s a critical part of any experience you create. It’s also a key reason we are in the process of a massive redesign for Obox.

Having spoken and made friends with many copywriters, it has always surprised us how many of them actually aspire to become authors.

Which leads neatly onto our new theme.

There are many new blogging platforms making the rounds recently. We have Medium, Svbtle, Ghost, WordPress.com, Tumblr and more. They are all great platforms, but with each passing day we see them more as a place for short posts as opposed to a place where an aspiring author can thrive.

We don’t believe that authors and long form writers are being served.

Inspired by what the New York times has done with Tomato Can Blues and Snow Fall, we set about trying to solve this super-niche problem and the end result is The Writer.

We had two goals in mind when creating The Writer: make a short story seem short, and make sure it doesn’t look like a blog.

That means no multi-column footers, no sidebar, no standard post list page. To make 2000 words seem short and easy to read, we worked tirelessly on the typography – font sizes and line-heights being our drug of choice during this project.

Also important to us was making sure the author of each short story is sufficiently represented at the foot of each post.

This doesn’t mean we completely stripped out the blogging element, though. The Writer still has comments, and if you insist on having widgets and a sidebar, you can include them with an elegant slide-out panel.

Finally, the home page and post pages have been designed around the inspiration of book covers. You can add a background image or color to each one, and also edit the color of the fonts. The end result is the potential to create a beautiful collection of your finest pieces.

The Writer is effectively a portfolio for the aspiring author. We hope you enjoy it!