A Publishing Platform Marketing Uses Without an Engineer

Every marketing page at Vannevar used to start as an engineering ticket. Copy changes waited in a sprint queue behind product work. The people who knew what a page should say had no way to ship it. Pages took weeks. For the company's public relaunch in February 2026, Jack Roizental designed the UI and I built vannevarlabs.com and its publishing system on Next.js and Sanity. Marketing now ships pages the same day without an engineer.

Blocks, not templates

I built a library of content blocks. Each maps one to one to a component in the design system I lead at Vannevar: hero, feature grid, testimonial, call to action, media. Editors compose pages from blocks in Sanity. They preview them live at every breakpoint and publish. Content modeling is the UX here. Blocks are broad enough to compose a page in minutes. Their constraints make any combination look designed. I put the rules in the blocks.

Design tokens are the contract. Every block uses the same tokens and components as the rest of the platform. Pages cannot drift off-brand. The design team stopped reviewing individual pages.

I added some of the motion. Links set in Thermochrome, the site's variable typeface, get heavier on hover. The highlight that sweeps the opening line of the hero is mine as well.

Outcome

Non-engineers compose and launch pages the same day. Engineering time on marketing pages is close to zero. Live preview did more for adoption than any training doc. Editors could see exactly what would ship before pressing publish.

The product side of Vannevar is under NDA. This page describes the publishing system and what it changed.