This was a real client project — a website for Janne Heikkinen, a Finnish member of parliament, built as part of a team of three. My role started as design lead and expanded into frontend development once the prototype was signed off.
The design work
Political websites have a specific set of constraints: they need to communicate credibility and accessibility at the same time, work for an audience with a wide age range, and present a lot of content — news, positions, contact information, constituency work — without feeling cluttered. I designed the layout and visual system from scratch, making decisions about hierarchy, typography, and colour that could scale across the full site without needing constant one-off fixes.
Getting the prototype approved by the client required presenting design decisions clearly and defending the choices that weren’t immediately obvious. That part of the process — translating design reasoning into something a non-designer can evaluate — is a skill I got a lot of practice with on this project.
The frontend work
The site is built on Gatsby with content managed through a GraphQL layer, which at the time was a common stack for static sites with a CMS backend. I joined the development phase after the prototype was complete and worked on implementing the designs in React and SASS, keeping the frontend aligned with what had been designed rather than letting implementation drift produce a different result.
The live site is still running and active.