Canon CMS : Designed and built in late 2019 at Datawheel

While I was working at Datawheel, we built enough of the same type of website that we eventually felt the need to build a custom content mangement system.

Enter Canon CMS, the world’s most complicated CMS™

Or, Canon CMS, the only content management system that requires you to know Javascript™

Okay I’m joking, it’s incredible that we managed to build a CMS for the types of complicated and data-heavy websites we built. It works by hitting API endpoints and allowing the user to create variables that can be inserted into rich text templates and data visualizations.

From a design perspective, we boiled down the types of sections that we often made into reuseable and customizeable content blocks, and I baked in a design system (codenamed Peaches) so that the bulk of styling for new websites could be taken care of relatively quickly and painlessly. The components I worked on are all accessible as well, even though this was not a priority at Datawheel.

I designed and implemented the interface for maximum readability and flexibility. Since different types of people would be using it, I wanted to make sure that the information was presented as straightforwardly as possible, and that UI elements could easily be collapsed or hidden when not necessary to the task at hand.