Scope of Work - UX/UI & Design

Urban List is a culture-led editorial brand, and the platform's design plays a central role in how audiences discover, read and engage with content. The new platform must support rich editorial storytelling while accommodating structured listings, commercial placements and multi-market publishing.

Design quality is a highly weighted evaluation criterion for this project, and rightly so. Urban List's visual identity, editorial hierarchy and user experience directly shape brand perception and audience engagement. Newism understands the importance of getting this right.

Urban List's Executive Creative Director James McManus will set the brand direction for the platform. Newism will work closely with James to translate that vision into a scalable digital design system, building on brand foundations for digital editorial execution.

Newism's Creative Director Raz brings more than twenty years of experience spanning print editorial, digital publishing and brand identity. His background in traditional editorial design principles combined with modern digital execution complements Urban List's creative leadership and supports the transition from brand direction to production-ready digital templates. Leevi provides platform insight and historical context, ensuring continuity with the existing system while supporting the creative evolution.

Our design approach focuses on three outcomes:

• creating an immersive editorial reading experience
• improving discovery between articles, listings, events and competitions
• building a component-driven design system that supports high publishing velocity

We treat UX, accessibility and performance as inseparable. Great design must be readable, fast and inclusive.

Newism will produce a Figma-based design system that defines reusable components, layout patterns and interaction behaviours. This system maps directly to CMS content blocks, ensuring design and implementation remain aligned as the platform evolves.

The design system will accommodate practical constraints such as IAB standard ad units and high-density content layouts, while also introducing opportunities for fresh commercial formats including partner content templates and branded editorial experiences.

Design Portfolio

Newism's design portfolio includes editorial platforms, membership experiences and content-rich publishing systems. Examples of relevant work can be reviewed in the About Newism section of this proposal.

Discovery & Information Architecture

Discovery is central to Urban List's value as a cultural platform. Users arrive through search, social or newsletters and explore through a mix of editorial storytelling and structured listings.

During the discovery phase we will audit key user journeys, validate the navigation model and sitemap, review directory and marketplace information architecture, and map journeys for editorial users, venue listers and members. Analytics will inform sitemap validation and help identify opportunities to improve discoverability.

Wireframing

Newism will produce low- and mid-fidelity wireframes for primary templates and flows, including homepage variants, location pages (Tier 1 and Tier 2), article templates (standard and affiliate), directory pages, and membership flows and dashboards.

Wireframes are developed responsively across desktop, tablet and mobile. The goal is to establish layout hierarchy, content density and interaction patterns before visual design begins.

Visual Design & Design System

Visual design will extend Urban List's brand guidelines into a cohesive digital system. The design system defines typography and editorial hierarchy, layout grids, reusable card frameworks, form patterns, interaction states and commercial placement patterns.

A key component is the content card framework, which governs how articles, venues, events and other entities appear across the platform. These cards form the primary building blocks for discovery experiences.

Accessibility is treated as a system constraint. Patterns will be designed with accessibility in mind from the outset and validated in line with WCAG standards.

Prototyping & Validation

Design and development work best when they evolve together. Rather than a linear handoff from design to code, our approach validates design decisions with real content and real platform constraints as early as possible.

Key templates are built in the browser using actual CMS content. This allows the team to evaluate layout, content density, commercial placements and responsive behaviour in context rather than in static mockups.

This approach supports structured review cycles while allowing design to respond to implementation learnings throughout the build.

Handoff & Governance

Design is delivered to support implementation, not just presentation. Newism will maintain shared component naming between design and code, document reusable patterns, and map design components to CMS blocks.

Because design and development evolve together, approval happens progressively rather than as a single handoff. This ensures Urban List can validate the experience in context while allowing design to adapt as the platform takes shape.