OVERVIEW
Design Philology is a digital archive dedicated to the history of teaching and research in design at the Politecnico di Milano. It gathers photographs, publications, press reviews, videos, and archival documents in a single place, along with the people and events that connect them.
The problem it solves is not preserving the materials — any archive would do that — but making them navigable for different audiences.
A scholar looking for a specific document, a student wishing to understand a period, and a curious visitor have opposing needs, and the system offers four distinct ways to enter the same heritage: a filterable search, navigable timelines, curated narratives by the editorial team, and a section of downloadable essays.
The site is public, bilingual in Italian and English, and supported by tools that allow the editorial team to compose and update content without technical intervention.
It is live, with a password-protected preview environment where the editorial team can verify changes before publishing them.
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Who manages the servers, updates, and backups.
By keyword, with filters for year range and material type (photograph, publication, press review, video, document), paginated results, and shareable links that preserve the applied filters.
The editorial team can publish pre-filtered thematic selections, which the visitor can open with a click from the menu.
On which events are arranged in chronological order; you can scroll and zoom by dragging, and each event opens its own detail sheet with the connected documents and people. The visual weight of an event reflects the importance assigned by the editorial team.
Curated stories that alternate images, texts, quotes, interviews, profiles of people and events in a free-flowing graphic composition, featuring section-based navigation and a content layout designed separately for both large screens and mobile phones.
For documents, events, people, and interviews, which open on top of the page without losing your reading position and remain accessible via a direct link.
Consultable by chapter, with downloadable PDFs in both languages.
Project presentation, open call for external contributions, homepage banners — editable by the editorial team without touching the code.
Where content editors see the page exactly as it will appear to the public while they compose it: they add blocks, reorder them, and choose their size, color, and image treatment from the combinations allowed by the graphic design.
Which applies a coherent visual yield to materials of heterogeneous origin and quality.
COMPOSITION
The system consists of four parts that work together.
The website is what the public sees: it builds each page on the server at the moment of the request, so that the content is always up to date and well-indexed by search engines.
The content management system — Directus, an off-the-shelf open-source platform — holds all the data and provides the editorial team with the interface to update it; it is the sole source of truth for the project.
A dedicated image service prepares resized and optimized versions of the archival materials, storing them to avoid having to regenerate them. A database stores profiles and relationships, supported by a temporary memory cache that speeds up repeated requests.
In front of everything, a router directs requests to the correct service and manages connection security: the visitor reaches the website, which in turn reads the content from the management system and requests the appropriate versions of the images from the image service; the editorial team works directly on the management system, where the database and
file archive reside.
The original content, collected on Notion, was transferred to the archive using import tools developed for the occasion.
STACK
Website
The most widely used set of tools today for content sites that need to be fast and well-indexed.
Content management
Open-source platform adopted in its standard version.
Database
Reference open-source relational database; a Redis temporary memory accelerates frequent requests.
Images
A tailored service based on sharp, the standard library for image processing in this environment.
Infrastructure
the services run in Docker containers on a managed server, with security certificates renewed automatically.
Monitoring
Sentry collects errors encountered by users and reports their occurrence.
