onscreen.design

onscreen.design is an in-development interactive encyclopedia of design history: a hundred years of visual communication — Bauhaus to brutalism, Swiss typography to skeuomorphism and flat design — organized around movements, pioneers, and the evolution of the interface itself.

The editorial architecture is MDX on Next.js. Each movement, figure, and era is a structured document with typed frontmatter, which lets the same source content drive timeline views, cross-linked encyclopedia entries, and comparison layouts without forked copy. Taxonomy is the hard part: movements overlap, influence flows in both directions, and a naive category tree misrepresents how design history actually happened — so entries carry explicit relationship metadata rather than a single parent category.

The design problem is recursive in the best way: pages about Swiss grid systems have to be set on a credible grid; entries on early GUI design have to make their case through their own interface behavior. That constraint makes the project a working laboratory for the typography, spacing, and layout-token decisions that feed back into client design-systems work.

The project is honestly in development: the content model, route architecture, and visual language are established, and the entry corpus is being written. It is listed here because the architectural decisions — MDX content modeling, taxonomy design, timeline interaction patterns — are representative of the design-engineering work I take on.