Superfeedr

Working on Chris Van Patten’s team at Van Patten Media, I did a few projects for Julien Genestoux’s Superfeedr over the years.

With Chris taking the lead on project management and design, I worked as a designer and front-end developer.

A new look (2014)

After five years, Superfeedr’s dashboard was in serious need of repair. For this part of the project, we researched what Superfeedr’s users most wanted to get out of a new back-end interface, and worked to accomplish those goals. This redesign brought all the features of this API-based service into a clean, usable interface underpinned by a consistent design language.

A shared design language (2016)

Fast-forward two years, and Superfeedr had its design splintered across four different interfaces: the marketing site, the blog, the back-end interface, and a standalone feed reader. Our task was to tie these different designs together, guiding everything back towards a consistent set of patterns.

This work led to the Superfeedr asset repository. Chris and I wrote a blog post for Superfeedr’s blog documenting the effort, and the result:

Making this pattern library helped us find parts of the design that were redundant, buggy, or less than ideal, and fix them to a known-good standard—fitting, given Superfeedr’s huge support for standards-based applications! Even though Superfeedr is just one entity, its four properties now stand that much more unified thanks to the documentation and implementation of these patterns, and any future expansions of the service can be quickly designed and implemented.

Chris Van Patten and myself, “Focus on the Front-End: Building an Asset Repository”, Superfeedr Blog

This project was a great opportunity to put all the principles I’d learnt about pattern libraries into practice. The quoted post includes many takeaways and thoughts on designing modularly, and might be worth reading if such subjects interest you. It was a good first step into the world of pattern libraries, and continues to be one of my favourite projects.