KATAPULT-Magazin.de

While working at KATAPULT magazine, one of my main priorities was to replace the old website with a new one that was both performant and stylistically fresh. The previous instance of Typo3 had outlived its usefulness, both in terms of functionality and design. Kirby was chosen as the CMS for the new site.

I had already started working on a design system for smaller websites in the KATAPULT universe. It evolved with smaller side projects and came to full fruition with the new website. As KATAPULT is a print-first project, the distinctive style was created in the context of the printed editions of the magazine. The design system therefore represents the best possible translation from print to digital. Under the hood, it’s a Sass framework that provides a set of basic components and is extended with Tailwind-inspired utilities.

About half of the development time went into a migration script - the biggest effort was converting old articles from a WYSIWYG editor to Kirby’s block format, ideally including all the HTML content variations that had crept into the WYSIWYG content over the years.

The biggest challenge was also the ultimate joy of the project: constructing the design and implementing it with CSS and vanilla JS. I prefer agile design-based development - designing directly in/with the code. In other words, a prototype was skipped. This requires trust on both sides. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Benni for giving me the freedom to work fully and autonomously; for trusting me and my skills.

It took me quite a while to find the right mix of KATAPULT vibe and online magazine until I got into the flow and was able to implement the layout of the website in about two weeks.