Skip to Content
Sanne de Vries
Subscribe

Sanne de Vries

Designer and maker, based in Amsterdam. Currently designing software for publishers at Ghost.

Sanne de Vries
Subscribe

Sanne de Vries

28 posts

A holistic approach

A holistic approach

April 15, 2025
0:00
/0:03

Ghost is a powerful tool with a ton of features. We keep quality high across the board by taking a holistic approach. Often, a project that starts with "let's add a few input fields" ends in a redesign of the entire area.

That might set off your scope creep alarm bells—and yes, it's always a delicate balance. But whenever we touch a part of the product, we expect to challenge the current state and improve it if we can. This mindset has kept design debt low and helped shape a product people genuinely love. A major enabler of this approach is that designers code, so the overall velocity of the team isn’t significantly impacted.

A recent example: we added a long list of social media fields to the profile modal. The existing layout wasn’t suited to accommodate them, so we redesigned it as a much more efficient, scalable tabbed modal.

Private betas

Private betas

April 02, 2025

We love doing private betas at Ghost—it's a great way to gauge how people will use your feature in the wild before committing.

Designing in Storybook

Designing in Storybook

February 14, 2025
0:00
/0:16

I love Storybook for designing components with lots of variations — it's a quick way to explore all combinations see where it breaks down. Plus, it's easy to mock up without having to wire up any logic.

Here's a new WIP call-to-action card for the Ghost editor.

Canvas chaos

Canvas chaos

February 08, 2025

Last week I designed a feature image for a Ghost changelog post to announce a new feature. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the starting and ending point in a single Figma file.

While I think I have a structured mind, my Figma files are messy. Each canvas is a direct reflection of my thought process — a digital piece of paper where I can explore without constraints.

Exploring card previews

Exploring card previews

February 04, 2025

Ghost's editor cards are the building blocks for different types of content — like images and videos, but also more complex ones.

From conversations with publishers, we know that their purpose isn’t always clear. Exploring whether a Notion-inspired hover preview would help.

Pinned

Unfiltered 2025

February 03, 2025

With social media being highly curated and polished, we don’t talk enough about what goes on behind the scenes—especially as designers.

So, here's to a new year of sharing unfiltered work in progress!