Website (2021)
At the launch of the new website, I wrote a short article about my motivation and accessibility -> Making the KATAPULT website accessible
During my time at KATAPULT magazine, one of my main concerns was replacing the old website with a new, performant one that was fresh in design. The previous Typo3 instance had outlived its usefulness in terms of both functionality and design. Kirby is used as the CMS.
I had already started tinkering with a design system for smaller websites in the KATAPULT universe. It grew with the smaller side projects and came to full maturity with the new website. As KATAPULT is a print-first project, the distinctive style was created within the context of the printed magazine editions. The design system thus represents the best possible translation from print to digital. Under the hood, it’s a Sass framework that delivers a set of basic components and gets extended with Tailwind-inspired utilities.
About half the development time went into a migration script – converting old articles from a WYSIWYG editor to Kirby’s block format while ideally carrying over all the HTML content variations that had snuck into the WYSIWYG content over the years. That was the biggest effort.
The biggest challenge was equally the project’s main joy: constructing the design and implementing it with CSS and vanilla JS. I prefer agile design development – designing directly in and with code. That meant skipping a prototype upfront. This requires mutual trust. I want to thank Benni here for giving me the freedom to work fully and autonomously; for trusting me and my abilities.
Finding the right blend of KATAPULT-ish and online magazine—I put that off for quite a while until I got into the flow and was able to implement the website’s layout in about two weeks.