Fieldnotes
A reading and annotation tool for researchers, built around the argument you are assembling rather than the documents you are storing.
- Client
- Fieldnotes
- Year
- 2024
- Discipline
- Editorial
- Role
- Product design
From a file manager to a thinking tool
Fieldnotes began as a better place to keep PDFs. The problem was that nobody's actual difficulty is storing papers — it is remembering why a paper mattered three months after reading it, and finding the four quotations that support a point you are now trying to make.
Notes as the primary object
We inverted the hierarchy. Documents became containers for annotations rather than the other way around, and the home screen became a view of your own writing, with sources attached. It is a small change to describe and a very large one to use.
Citation without ceremony
Pulling a quotation into a draft carries its source, page, and your original note automatically. The tedious part of scholarly writing is not the thinking — it is the bookkeeping — so we spent most of the engineering budget there.
Where it landed
The product stopped competing with file managers and started competing with the notebook beside the laptop, which is a much better fight to be in.
Tell me what you are building.
If you have a product that is nearly right and stuck, or a blank page and a deadline, I would like to hear about it. A first call is thirty minutes and costs nothing.
Open for two projects this spring