Case study · Canadian Journal of Native Education
A role-based editorial systemfor four decades of Indigenous scholarship.
A custom OJS theme with a hierarchy for readers, reviewers and authors — and four decades of Indigenous scholarship made navigable.
- Client
- Canadian Journal of Native Education
- Year
- 2025
- Services
- UX/UI · Editorial Design · OJS Implementation
- Platform
- Open Journal Systems
- Practice
- Knowledge Systems — Publishing
01 · The brief
A system for readers, reviewers and authors — each in a different role.
Three audiences land on the same site every week: a reader looking for a paper, a reviewer with a deadline, an author submitting work. The old CJNE — built on a battle-worn OJS — buried each of them under the same flat hierarchy. Submission was ambiguous. The archive of four decades of Indigenous scholarship had no pathway. The article itself was hard to read.
We designed a system around role, not around the homepage — a scaffolding within OJS that carries the journal forward, clarity first, everything else in service of it.
02 · Three roles
One journal, three ways in.Each role enters at the right depth.
Choose a role to see the surface designed for it.
Reading is the unit of the journal. It had to come first.
Academic articles are dense by nature — citations, methodology, footnotes, structured argumentation. The redesigned article page introduces clear typographic hierarchy, generous line-length, and a sticky reading scaffold so readers never lose their place in long-form material.
Tabs hierarchise the content — improving readability and accessibility without disrupting long-form reading.
Submissions and reviews — sorted, not stacked.
Editorial guidelines are dense and role-specific, and historically lived in long, unbroken pages. Tabs separate the experience by audience, so a reviewer enters at the protocol — without sifting through content meant for someone else.
The author enters at the right depth, in the right context.
The submitting author gets the checklist and the guidelines at the right depth and in the right context — role-based tabs improve clarity and accessibility across dense editorial content.
03 · The homepage
Current research first,the archive quietly beneath.
A homepage built around the article — featuring current research first, with archives and editorial pathways quietly accessible beneath.
Scroll inside the page
An academic journal is not a website. It’s an archive — and it should be designed like one.
Design principle — editorial over engagement
04 · The archive
Forty years of scholarship,navigable in seconds.
The volume archive collapses four decades of issues into a single editorial index — chronological, searchable, and built so a researcher arriving for the first time can find a 1992 paper as easily as a current one.
ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ
05 · The typography
The journal had no typographic system.We built one.
Three families chosen so an article in Cree renders with the same care as one in English. Editorial range first — Latin display, Indigenous syllabics, screen-first body — picked for coverage, parity and longevity.
Display · Headings
Ysabeau
Indigenous knowledge in pedagogy
Open-source contemporary serif · 400 / 500 / 600 / 700
Humanist proportions, confident at large sizes and legible at small. Carries the weight of an editorial title without inheriting the formality of a traditional academic serif.
Syllabics
ᐁ ᐃ ᐅ ᐊ ᐯ ᐱ ᐳ ᐸ
ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ · ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ · ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᒧᐎᓐ
Noto Sans Canadian Aboriginal · 400 / 500 / 700
Full coverage for Cree, Inuktitut and Anishinaabe syllabic scripts, with rendering parity to the Latin body. Set in the journal’s orange — the only place colour appears in the system, reserved for the script that carries the journal’s reason for being.
Body · UI
Inter
Abstract This paper examines language revitalisation programs in three Indigenous communities across northern Canada, drawing on five years of participant observation and forty-two interviews with educators.
Variable screen-first sans · 400 / 500 / 600
Used for body copy, abstracts, footnotes, navigation and metadata. Neutral, screen-optimised, gets out of the way so the writing leads.
06 · The outcome
A scalable editorial system,built to outlast its trends.
What was delivered is a UI system, not a single redesign — a kit of editorial components, tabs, archives, article scaffolds and submission flows that the journal can extend issue by issue without redesigning each time.
Built within the constraints of OJS, accessible by default, and shaped around the rhythms of how readers, reviewers, and editors actually use a scholarly journal. Built to last as long as the scholarship it carries.