DIE ZEIT

When we started working with DIE ZEIT, we walked into an aging collection of design decisions: years of choices layered on top of each other, none of them wrong on their own, but together no longer holding up.

Our job was to clean it up: pull it apart, find the logic, and rebuild it as a design system the editorial team could actually work with day to day. Editors needed components they could deploy without designer hand-holding; designers needed a system they could keep adding to without breaking.

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We spent two years inside the product and editorial teams. The design system and the product features built each other: lay a foundation, ship a feature, extend the system, repeat.

We moved the navigation moved off newspaper department logic, which was internal structure dressed up as user value, and into topics readers actually came for.

We rebuilt article templates and teasers to handle the actual range ZEIT publishes: breaking news, long-form features, data visualizations, explainer pieces.

UX & UI Design, Design System