La Silla Vacía
A unified digital system for Colombia's most influential independent journalism platform.
Client
La Silla Vacía
Year
2018-2020
Services
UX/UI Design
Product Design
We transformed La Silla Vacía's digital experience into a clearer, more consistent, and easier-to-navigate product, turning it into a coherent and scalable platform for the media outlet's growth.
View site live
Overview
La Silla Vacía had revamped its visual identity, but its digital presence failed to reflect this. As the media outlet grew with new formats, products, and specialized portals, the experience began to fragment. Each section looked like a different site, which affected navigation, brand perception, and the ability to scale the product in the future.

Without a unified system, the platform became difficult to maintain, complex to update, and inconsistent for users. The challenge was to transform a scattered ecosystem into a coherent, modern digital product capable of sustaining the media outlet's editorial growth.
approach
We created a digital design system capable of supporting more than ten portals under the same visual and structural logic. We began by reorganizing the information architecture and navigation flows, prioritizing the mobile experience, where more than 80% of traffic is concentrated.

From that order, we developed a consistent visual language and a set of reusable modules for content in different formats: news, opinion, analysis, profiles, specials, video, podcasts, and interactive pieces. Each component was designed to adapt to multiple contexts without losing its identity.

The result is a clear and scalable platform, where all information coexists under the same editorial system. A product ready to grow without losing coherence, improve the reading experience, and sustain the evolution of the medium in the future.
THE PROCESS
Design decisions that shaped the system
The project demanded two distinct design processes running in parallel. Mobile came first: with over 80% of traffic on small screens, every decision around hierarchy, navigation, and readability was grounded in that context. Desktop followed its own logic, a different set of constraints and opportunities, where column structures, advertising space, and denser information layouts required rethinking each pattern from scratch rather than simply scaling up.

At the same time, we built the system from the bottom up. Instead of designing full pages from the start, we created and tested small, isolated modules, each one responding to a specific content format: news, opinion columns, profiles, podcasts, interactive specials. As each module proved flexible and reliable, we assembled them into complete page templates. Color decisions, typography styles, and visual tone evolved in parallel, so by the time the templates came together, the system already had a consistent identity underneath.
Next Project
Híbrido