Digital Futures Lab
We built the digital home for India's leading independent tech-policy research studio, replacing a Notion-based workflow with a CMS their interdisciplinary team could own.
The Brief
Digital Futures Lab is an independent research studio studying the relationship between technology and society in India and the Majority World.
Naasha Mehta led the visual design; we handled development. The split needed close collaboration — making sure the design held up across screen sizes and devices. Alongside that: replacing Notion, which was both the team's CMS and the published website itself.
The Challenge
Designing and developing in parallel needs a working rhythm. This was our first time pairing with an external web designer, and finding that rhythm mattered as much as the build itself.
At the same time, DFL was moving off Notion — a tool that gives you infinite flexibility and asks almost nothing of you in return. The job was to make a structured CMS feel like a gain rather than a restriction.
Our Approach
- 01
Extending the design across screens
Naasha designed the desktop version of the site on Webflow and trusted us to take a first pass at the smaller viewports — adapting her layout, spacing, and hierarchy down to mobile in a way that felt true to her thinking. She reviewed each pass and weighed in where things needed to change. The collaboration ran on trust in both directions: hers in letting us interpret, ours in showing the work early and often.
- 02
From Notion to a real CMS
DFL had been running publications, projects, news, and everything else through Notion — each page shaped freely as needed. A structured CMS sounds like a constraint until you sit with what structure actually buys you: consistency, search, and a site that holds its shape as content grows. We built the schema around their content types, giving editors real choices where the design allows for them and sensible defaults where it doesn't.
- 03
Filters that stay shareable
The site needed filtering across publications, projects, and news — and the filtered results needed to be shareable. We put the filter state in the URL: copy the link, paste it anywhere, and the same view comes back.
- 04
Reports in the page, not behind a link
DFL publishes research as PDFs. Rather than send visitors off to a download prompt or a separate viewer, we used an open source PDF viewer to bring the reports into the page itself. The reading happens in context, on-site.
The Result
The move from Notion to a purpose-built CMS changed how the team works. Editors don't have to think about design when publishing — they write, and the output looks right. Google Analytics, set up as part of the project, gives them visibility into site performance they didn't have before. The site now gets around 2,000 visitors a month — a real audience for a research organization working between technology, governance, and society.
earthwhile is our go-to for websites. From building the organisation's main website to micro-sites, they always manage to turn our fuzzy ideas into thoughtful, polished experiences that align with our vision. They’re always patient, responsive, and easy to work with.