Responses by Ana Jesus, creative director, Monotonomo.

Background: Plumwood Mountain Journal is an Australian and international journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics. The journal’s previous website was outdated, hard to use and no longer fit its current needs and goals. This new website aims to be a place where poetry can breathe new life—a place for reading and reflection, taking the readers on a journey through words, thoughts and ideas for environmental action and awareness. We carefully crafted the website to be functional and engaging, a reading place that offers everything from poetry readings to book reviews and essays.

Design core: The site has an editorial look and feel inspired by the traditional way of reading on paper or books. With a combination of serif and non-serif fonts—Libre Baskerville and Inter—there was extra care put into typography styling to optimize readability and content hierarchy. Alongside an earthy pastel color palette with botanical illustrations and detailed, textural, natural imagery of unspoiled Australian landscapes, the site connects to its environmental content and the land where the journal is created.

Favorite details: We’re proud of the issue’s page solution, as it responded to the challenge of showcasing 30 to 40 poems per issue with no associated imagery. With a split screen, we created an engaging visual page featuring the cover issue on one side and a scrollable list on the other. Each issue also has a different color palette that reflects the theme and the issue’s cover identity—this creates a visual variation between issues and a color identification that feeds into the individual poems’ detail pages.

Challenges: We were working with a legacy of about 900 poems that were uncategorized and needed to retain styling formatting—as poems, in particular, are very sensitive to formatting with typography styles and indentations that must respect the poet’s writing. The most challenging aspect was to find a pattern and set the rules for all varying poems and articles while creating an easy reading experience that could work for both short- and long-form content.

Navigation structure: The main navigation was designed for ease of use, distinguishing two levels of content hierarchy. On the journal’s issue page detail, it’s possible to easily navigate between other issues using a previous-and-next navigation without returning to the all issues page. Likewise, it’s also possible to move forward and backward between poems within an issue, as if reading a paper publication.

Technology: This is a WordPress website fully built from scratch using Locomotive and GSAP for smooth scrolling and animations.