Dezeen rebuilt its website after 10 years — and chose evolution, not revolution

Dezeen has redesigned its website for the first time in 10 years. The design publication, which started in 2006 as a basic WordPress blog run from a spare room, worked with creative technology studio Made by On to rebuild both the front and back ends of the site from the ground up — while deliberately keeping the look readers already know.

“Evolution, not revolution, has been the aim,” the publication’s co-CEOs Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li write. The classic typographic treatments dating back to designer Micha Weidmann’s original work remain, joined by new styling formats, splashes of colour to identify different services, varied image sizes and horizontal scrolling sections to break up the vertical feed. Navigation gets a fresh menu, search and filtering system unified across all of Dezeen’s services, which had grown up ad hoc over the years and could feel fragmented.

Why this matters to independent teams: most small studios and publishers face the same fork Dezeen did. The old site was built on ageing technology that had grown clunky; things broke too often and fixing them was slow and painful. The temptation in that spot is a dramatic relaunch that also throws away the brand equity. Dezeen’s answer was to separate the two jobs: rebuild the machinery completely, change the surface only where it earns its keep.

Two details are worth stealing. First, performance was treated as an editorial value, not a technical chore: reducing the site’s carbon impact was a stated priority, with heavy work on image optimisation, and hosting moved to infrastructure running on 100-percent-renewable energy. Second, the rebuild brought search and recommendation engines previously run by external services onto Dezeen’s own infrastructure, and the new layouts were engineered to meet current web accessibility standards — unglamorous work that compounds for every reader, every day.

The new site also makes room for what Dezeen has become: not just a daily news feed but a suite of services, from awards and events guides to a showroom and a jobs board, all now under refreshed brand guidelines from Weidmann. For a small team sitting on a site that “mostly works,” the question this redesign poses is a useful one: what would you rebuild underneath, even if nobody notices the surface?

Source: Dezeen, “Dezeen launches a richer and more versatile new website” (published October 21, 2026).