Improving record navigation for industries and types

Part 14 in my series on building an online archive to celebrate the Rotis font

After the giddiness of my last update, marking the archive’s 50th record, it was time to update and refine the overall navigation to make those records findable!

I introduced navigation items and dedicated pages for each industry and each type. For example, check out the ‘Hospitality and Dining’ industry page and the ‘Print’ type page.

These pages currently all follow the same structure, but I’m pondering how to give them each their own personality.

A core feature of the website, the humble thumbnail, has now been turned into a reusable and easily tweaked ‘component’

I also resolved a lot of ‘technical debt’ this week, including:

• Restructuring pages to reduce hard-coded values. For example, the content of almost all pages is constrained to fit in the middle 900px. Blocks within that were sometimes unnecessarily hard-coded to 900px width as well, rather than automatically filling the width of their container.

• Replacing record thumbnails with a single master component. These are currently all formatted the same way across pages, but turning them into components will enable me to make design tweaks that automatically propagate everywhere.

And that’s it for this week! See you next time 😄