Why I Built an Editorial Design System for My Practice
Instead of building another portfolio, I created a space designed to hold work over time—inspired by the Eames' exhibition thinking and shaped by service design principles.
Written For
Service designers and design leaders working in complex domains who have felt friction between what their practice actually is and what a portfolio is equipped to show.
Designers have never had more platforms, apps, and systems through which to showcase their work. Yet, the question that keeps returning is: “how can I clearly express who I am and the work that I do?”
Instead, the systems we rely on for reach, ease, and expediency often become the very things that flatten our individuality.
If I were starting again today, this is what I would tell my younger self.
Look beyond the feed
Treat any social platform, app, or feed that relies on ad revenue as acquaintances, not friends. They are designed to distract your attention, not to inspire. While the fightback against the dark patterns employed has begun, there is still a lot of work needed to push back against its pervasiveness.
Instead look to slower forms of ideas and mediums.
I began looking outside contemporary digital design for examples of how complex work had been communicated before the web (and lets face it, we mean social media) demanded constant attention.
I kept coming back to the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Their approach to creating exhibitions, films, and publications treated information less as content to consume and more as material to explore. Their philosophy felt closer to archives than interfaces, where you have the space and time to explore.
What began as a small experiment on my own website turned into an editorial design system. An attempt to translate exhibition thinking, archival organisation, and service design principles into a digital environment.
What interested me was the methods of the Eames’ work. Information was never presented as a final answer rather it was arranged so that people could build understanding for themselves.
In service design, we often work this way behind the scenes. Mapping relationships, tracing journeys, revealing systems and yet our portfolios rarely show this thinking. They show outcomes, not orientation.
To achieve a similar approach, I would need a new design system for my site that shifts the emphasis to exploration of my work.
From portfolio to exhibition
What emerged was an editorial design system—a way of organising thinking so it could evolve in public. Instead of behaving like a portfolio, with web pages designed to persuade, it has become a space designed to hold work over time. Notes sit besides projects, experiments live next to case studies. Slowly the website has stopped behaving as a portfolio and more like an exhibition.
Bringing that sensibility into a website introduced an unexpected quality: materiality. Pages feel less like screens and more like spaces. Navigation feels closer to browsing a collection than clicking through an interface.
The goal is not nostalgia for the pre-web era, but to recover modes of attention the writer and audience that today’s platforms and apps had quietly abandoned.
Shaped by service design
In hindsight, the design system is shaped by service design as much as it is inspired by design history.
Service design teaches us that experiences unfold over time, across touchpoints, and through relationships. Why should a designer’s own presence online be any different?
Rather than presenting a static identity, the site becomes a service: something maintained, iterated, and experienced gradually.
Looking back, I realise the question is not really about finding the right platform.
It is about building a place where my work could exist without being compressed into updates, case studies, or personal branding.
Building this space has changed how I think about showing work. Not as something to publish once, but as something to return to, revise, and live alongside.
If I were starting again today, I would begin not with a portfolio, but with a place that could grow with me.
That shift led me to reconsider something fundamental: perhaps I have been designing too many interfaces, and not enough exhibitions.