North & Co.

Editors were talented, not technical; the CMS had to reward good defaults and resist broken combinations.

Video embeds and tall galleries were the main sources of layout bugs.

No shutdown of publishing during rollout—migrations had to be incremental.

Accessibility couldn’t regress when new media types appeared.

We audited published pages for inconsistent spacing tokens and orphan headings.

We watched editors build a case study and noted where they reached for workarounds (custom HTML, rogue breaks).

Pattern library ties components to design tokens; editors pick patterns, not raw spacing.

Media components enforce aspect ratios and captions so galleries stay coherent on mobile.

Migration scripts normalized legacy pages into patterns where possible; edge cases got manual review.

Short video walkthrough replaced a forty-page manual.

New case studies looked ‘on brand’ without design review becoming a bottleneck.

Layout bugs reported by the team dropped after ratio-locked media components shipped.