Europeana

Explore over 50 million artworks, artefacts, books, videos and sounds from more than 3,500 museums, galleries, libraries and archives across Europe


A major European project to expand access to the contents of museums & cultural archives across Europe, the Europeana sites had become inconsistent, slow and hard to update. They didn't reflect the brand and didn't work on mobile devices.

I worked with the in-house web team to redesign all the Europeana sites from the ground up, unify their UI and visual design, make them accessible, responsive and modular, improve usability and make them maintainable.

Unique challenges:

Fast iteration — keeping it sketchy so the focus is on how things work.

We led the world in directly integrating the front-end pattern library and design system I developed with the live code running the site.

This meant we could deploy fixes and updates to multiple sites controllably and easily keep them consistent and up to date.

For larger sites, design systems keep everything consistent and save development time

Impact

"You have got a vast number of things exactly right - it must have taken a huge amount of work and effort - but man, it's paid off. It's really, really, really good."
— Wolfgang "Chris" Wild (Retronaut.com)