Two decades of design journalism, as easy to find as today’s story

Search moved from Algolia to Typesense, hosted on Dezeen’s own infrastructure.

Algolia already powered site search, and its projected enterprise pricing rose sharply with the filtering and related-content features the redesign was built around.

Algolia Enterprise was the proven managed option, at that rising price. Self-hosted Typesense had no comparable recurring licence but needed more development and hosting coordination up front. We built a WordPress proof of concept that ran semantic search and recommendations on Typesense before Dezeen committed to it. Dezeen’s hosting provider then scaled the production and staging environments to run it.

Recommendations now come from each story’s subject, on the same engine as search, and an opaque tracking-based service is gone.

The old related-content modules ran on a third-party recommendation service that tracked readers and whose logic was opaque. Read Next now follows the publishing sequence. Recommended Stories are matched by subject across the archive in Typesense, so every story gets related coverage automatically. Service widgets for Jobs and Events keep manual overrides for promotion.

We turned the identity guidelines into working modules through creative prototyping, testing each in the browser on Dezeen’s own stories before detailed design.

Micha Weidmann Studio, who created the original Dezeen logo, refreshed the brand guidelines and gave every sub-brand updated colours and logos, so the services read as one family. The guidelines set Dezeen’s typography and spacing. We turned them into a digital system, adding the responsive grids, interface components, interaction states and motion they did not cover.

We prototyped every page type and its module variations in the browser, on Dezeen stories, the real content model and the CMS’s constraints, and judged each module there before it was finalised. Micha’s classic typography carries through, and each service now has its own colour. Every story still starts at the top of the homepage and works its way down, whatever its subject, and as Dezeen’s range grew, some of its best content got lost. We tested grid proportions, headline treatments and module mixes there. The reverse-chronological feed and its square images stay, joined by varied image sizes and horizontal scrolling sections that bring forward selected stories and content types. The right sidebar is decluttered, and Dezeen Weekly, the podcast launched in 2026, has more prominence.

On article pages, a sticky left sidebar keeps the headline, byline and sharing tools in view as the reader scrolls. Headlines are set in Standard CT and body copy in Chronicle. Long-form writing and opinion get more flexible templates that take larger images, galleries, slideshows and vertical video.

The commercial layer is part of the same module library. Newsletter sign-up sits within the page, advertising formats are designed alongside the editorial, and partnership content is clearly and consistently badged.

The migration was planned and tested against the whole archive from early in the build.

The old site ran on ageing technology that broke too often and was slow to fix, so we rebuilt the front and back ends from the ground up. Dezeen runs to tens of thousands of pages and millions of assets, and its traffic spikes sharply. We moved the full database and media library into a local environment early. On our recommendation, hosting moved from public cloud networks to dedicated UK infrastructure run by The Positive Internet Company on 100 per cent renewable energy. The Positive Internet Company also set up staging and dedicated Typesense instances.

Disqus comments, Apple News, transactional email and the other integrations the newsroom depends on are built and tested locally. Third-party services such as LiftIgniter and OptinMonster are retired. Stress testing and fuzzing covered more than 100 components in the module library and added defensive CSS, empty-state guards, accessibility improvements, and more caching and security tests. Performance work throughout the build, particularly on images, has reduced the site’s carbon footprint.

Awards, Courses, School Shows and Showroom now run on the same WordPress platform as the magazine.

The Awards section is built in the CMS. It holds all its pages and judges, syncs with Evessio and is indexed in Typesense alongside the magazine. Courses and School Shows keep separate content structures, which kept the first build and its migration predictable. Dezeen Jobs follows on its own site. It is built on parent and child themes and has its own staging environment, zero-downtime deploys and demo data.

Brands get dedicated pages in their own URL space, which gather a brand’s coverage from across Dezeen. Editorial tags stay the magazine’s filing system, and Showroom links to a brand’s page where one exists.

Every Dezeen service now shares one design language, menu, search and filtering system, over two decades of coverage migrated and restructured to work as a library.

The new platform is more stable and responsive. Search and recommendations run on Dezeen’s own Typesense index across tens of thousands of articles and need no recurring licence. The site is hosted in the UK on renewable energy and built to the latest web accessibility standards.

Editors get a modular system they can rearrange themselves. Launch is the first release. Saved stories and member collections already work on the same index, and Dezeen Jobs is next.