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1. Context & Problem

As digital products scale, three recurring challenges surface:

  • Content bottlenecks — Marketing and business teams relied on developers for content updates, slowing time-to-market.

  • Inconsistent design — New pages were built without a unified component system, causing design drift.

  • Limited scalability — Each new feature required duplicated effort across content, code, and design.

Screenshot of portfolio with consistent UI patterns.
📸 Case study 2 - Figure 1: Design prototypes depicting consistent UI patterns.

During my years as a front-end developer, I saw how these issues grow costly in enterprise environments. For this project, I set out to build not just a site, but a scalable platform where design, content, and code worked together.

2. Solution

I built a React-based application with Next.js, powered by a headless CMS (Contentful) and integrated with my custom component library.

Key goals, each tied to business value:

  • Reusable, CMS-driven components → Faster feature development and reduced duplication.

  • Design consistency → Strengthening brand identity and reduced design drift.

  • Decoupled content from code → Empowering business teams to update content without developer bottlenecks.

  • Accessibility baked in → Minimizing compliance risks and broadened user reach.

  • SEO & performance → Leveraging Next.js Static Site Generation (SSG) to deliver fast, optimized, and discoverable pages.

🎥 Case study 2: Contentful seemless integration with a React app

3. Implementation

I built this app on top of Carbon Design Systems, chosen Next.js for its flexible and efficient rendering methods (Server Side Rendering and Static Site Generation), and went for ContentFul because it’s a headless CMS with a clean GraphQL/REST API, which makes it easy to fetch structured content.

Tech Stack & Architecture

  • Framework: Next.js (folder routing, server-side and client components, renderding methods, optimization).

  • CMS: Contentful (for structured content modeling and editorial flexibility).

  • UI Foundation: Custom React component library (ensuring accessibility, consistency, and reusability).

  • Documentation: Storybook (for component showcase and developer onboarding).

  • CI/CD: Vercel (for automated build, test, and deploy).

Example: Page Assembly with Contentful + Component Library

Here is how everything works:

  • Content authors build pages by combining reusable modules (hero banners, tiles, etc.).

  • React components consume structured data from Contentful, rendering accessible, responsive layouts.

  • Design system tokens ensure consistent typography, spacing, and color usage across all pages.

Screenshot of Contentful content model with a “Page” entry referencing reusable components.
Screenshot of Contentful content model with a “Page” entry referencing reusable components.

4. Impact

✨ Business + Technical Outcomes:

Integrating library components made the building process so much faster. The bulk of the development process had to do with the scaffholding, the routing system, pulling the content from ContentFul and more. Given that I completed the project on my own, here are some estimations:

  • 40% faster feature delivery due to reusable, CMS-powered components.

  • Content author empowerment: Easy to manage and publish without developer intervention, improving marketing agility.

  • Strengthened design consistency: Reduced drift and accessibility gaps.

📸 "[Analytics dashboard preview coming soon] The application has successfully launched, and we are now in the data collection phase. The upcoming analytics will focus on validating the platform not just as a technical achievement, but as a tangible business-enabling solution."

5. Solution Engineering Mindset

This project demonstrates my approach as a Design Technologist bridging design, engineering, and business goals:

  • Business Alignment: Designed architecture to reduce content bottlenecks and accelerate marketing initiatives.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with designers to define reusable modules, and with content stakeholders to model flexible structures in Contentful.

  • Scalability: Built the app as a platform, not a one-off site, enabling long-term growth and reuse.

  • Enablement: Documentation and Storybook empowered developers to contribute confidently, while content teams gained autonomy.

🎥 Case Study 2: Walkthrough of component library in Storybook + integration with CMS

6. Commitment to Quality

This application is more than a demo — it’s a blueprint for scalable, enterprise-grade digital platforms. My commitments include:

  1. Performance benchmarking (Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals).

  2. Comprehensive testing (unit + integration).

  3. SEO optimization (leveraging Next.js Static Site Generation, and Server Components)

  4. Future roadmap: localization, visual regression testing, and multi-site scalability.

✨ Takeaway

This project reflects my role as a Design Technologist with solution engineering focus:

  • I don’t just build features — I design systems.

  • I don’t just code interfaces — I create scalable solutions that empower teams, improve workflows, and deliver measurable business impact.