The MAAR Review needed a digital home that treated the work as the point, not the platform. Generic literary templates bury poems and essays inside blog chrome built for marketing posts. A journal with four categories (poetry, fiction, visual art, non-fiction) needs readers to move between them without losing place. Editors needed to publish spotlight features, archive issues, and surface contributor pages without fighting a CMS that assumes every post is the same shape. Writers needed a submit path that sat next to the journal, not on a separate subdomain that felt like an afterthought.

I designed the reading experience first. The homepage opens with a spotlight piece and branches into popular and recent publications in a grid where category, date, and title travel with every card. Typography does the editorial work: serif for the journal name, monospace for navigation labels and metadata, pastel chips for category tags. The CMS maps to how the editors actually publish: issues, contributors, team pages, and a submit flow wired into the same navigation shell as the reading pages.

themaarreview.com.ng runs as a full journal site with spotlight features, category browsing, issue archives, and contributor profiles. Poetry, fiction, visual art, and non-fiction each carry distinct tagging without splitting into separate sites. The about, team, and submit pages live inside the same typographic world as the published work. Editors publish through structured content types rather than free-form posts that break on the next redesign.