2024
Web Design
A responsive layout system and component library for a research group's public site.
Details
Meridian publishes dense technical work to a mixed audience. We built a layout system that lets a diagram, a table and a long paragraph sit on the same page without any of them feeling like an exception, then handed over components the researchers maintain themselves.
Client
Meridian Labs
year
2024
Problem
A vocabulary, not a redesign
Every new paper arrived with a layout request. The site had become a pile of one-off pages.
The fix was not a redesign but a vocabulary: a small set of blocks that cover the real range of content.
We audited 140 published pages and found 31 distinct layouts, of which eleven accounted for almost everything. The remaining twenty were variations nobody could justify once they were lined up side by side.
Research sites fail in a particular way. The content is unusually demanding — tables, equations, figures with multi-paragraph captions — and the people publishing it are not designers and should not have to become designers.
So the brief inverted. Rather than ask what the site should look like, we asked what a researcher should be able to publish on a Friday afternoon without asking permission.
My Process
Research
We catalogued every page on the existing site and sorted them by what they actually contained, not what they were called. Eleven real content shapes came out of roughly sixty pages.
Brainstorming
The team expected a redesign. We argued for a vocabulary instead — a small set of blocks that cover the real range, so a new paper never needs a new layout.
Prototyping
Each block was built against the densest example we could find: a full-width diagram, a twelve-column table, a 4,000-word essay. If it held there, it held everywhere.
Handover
We migrated the archive onto the new blocks and wrote a two-page usage note. The researchers have published without design input since.
Delivery
Eleven components and a usage note
Eleven components, a two-page usage note, and a migration of the existing archive.
Fluid 12-column grid
Table and figure blocks with shared captions
Dark mode from the same tokens
The archive migration was the part we underestimated. All 140 pages were rebuilt against the new blocks over six weeks, and roughly a fifth of them turned up content the components could not yet hold — mostly inline equations inside table cells, which is as awkward as it sounds.
Handover was a working session rather than a document. Two researchers published a paper each while we watched, and the questions they asked became the usage note.
Eighteen months on the component count is twelve. One block was added, none were removed, and nobody has asked for a bespoke page.
