Mona Soft and Host

Every word changed. The rewrite was driven by search, which meant new page structures, new sections, and pages that hadn’t existed at all.

That explains the shape of the evidence. There’s no clean before-and-after of the same section on this project, because the sections don’t exist in both versions. What can be compared is the whole thing: two pages against a structured site, and nothing reusable against a component set that two products now share.

I built Mona Soft first and made the system there. When Host came round, I took Soft’s components across and adjusted them.

So these are really two systems: Host began as a copy of Soft’s components. At the time it was the fast way to get Host moving, and nobody in the room suggested otherwise, including me.

Host is still the useful half of the story. Forking a system onto a second product a few weeks after building it is the fastest way to find out which parts of it were real and which were just decisions that happened to suit the first product.

Soft also got a page template, so designers arriving later could build a new page by editing an existing structure instead of starting from an empty artboard.

The disagreement was about effects. I’d designed transitions and motion I liked, and the developer showed me what they cost in page load.

On most projects that’s a trade-off. On this one it wasn’t, because the whole rewrite existed to be found in search. Motion that slows the page works directly against the thing the client was paying for. Once it was framed that way, there wasn’t much left to argue about.

We cut some effects and simplified others. The version that shipped is less interesting to look at in a portfolio and better at its job.

I’d build one system with two themes. The version that shipped means a fix to a button in Soft never reaches Host, and somebody has to remember that forever.