- Client
- GrN.dk — this site
- Sector
- Web design / Drupal
- Period
- August–September 2026
At a glance
The site you are reading redesigned itself with the same card-driven AI pipeline it writes about. Eight complete design directions were built as static previews from the site's real content — real articles, real cases, both languages — and published side by side on demo.grn.dk. One won. It then became a brand-new Drupal 11 theme, built in phases on the live site behind a logged-in preview, and switched on with a single config change.
The challenge
grn.dk is a live bilingual Drupal 11 site with no staging environment, a daily article pipeline that never pauses, and Cloudflare caching both HTML and assets. The new look had to be judged on the site's actual content rather than placeholder text, built without interrupting publishing, and the final switch had to be boring: reversible with one command, cache-safe, and invisible until the moment it happened.
The solution
Five design directions were generated as static previews straight from the site's own database content and published on a hidden demo shelf. After a feedback round, three refined variants joined them — eight in all — and design 6, "Personal", was picked.
The production theme was generated from Drupal core's Starterkit (not a sub-theme), then built up in reviewed phases: shell and front page first, then article, case, gallery, page, search and error templates. A small theme negotiator served the unreleased theme only to logged-in users holding a preview permission, so every anonymous visitor kept the old design while each phase was captured, reviewed and signed off on the live site — fifty screenshots per review round, desktop and mobile, English and Danish.
The results
Go-live was one drush config change plus a Cloudflare zone purge, with the old theme left installed as a one-command rollback that was never needed. Lighthouse on the live site after the switch: 100 performance on desktop for both the front page and articles (90 and 97 on mobile), best practices and SEO at 100, accessibility 96 — on par with the heavily tuned theme it replaced. The eight preview directions stayed public on the demo shelf as part of the story.
