INKR CMS 1.0

Overview

INKR CMS is a purpose-built content management system for internal operations teams, designed to handle high-volume content onboarding at scale for the INKR Comics app.

Unlike its predecessor INKR Backstage, INKR CMS is built for power users: straightforward, no-frills, and optimized for daily, high-frequency use.

I led a team of three designers through the conceptualization and design execution of INKR CMS 1.0.

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Background

Following the closure of Manga Rock in September 2019, we were under pressure to launch INKR Comics before users moved on. The bottleneck was content. We needed a reliable way to onboard licensed titles at scale. INKR Backstage, our existing CMS, wasn't built for that kind of continuous, high-volume usage and quickly proved inadequate.

I was tasked with leading a team of three designers to build a replacement: a no-nonsense CMS designed specifically for internal employees who would use it every day.

We also took the opportunity to retire our aging in-house design system based on Material Design, which had accumulated years of technical and design debt. In its place, we adopted Ant Design, a robust, well-maintained open-source system that freed us from the cost of maintaining our own.

Highlights

Accountability-focused

The old system had no concept of individual users. Everyone shared a single admin account with no activity log, making it impossible to trace errors or assign responsibility. INKR CMS introduced role-based permissions to scope what each user can do, and an Activity Log as the single source of truth for accountability.

Granular publish settings

Licensed content comes with strict distribution rules. Geography, platform, audience, and monetization method are all governed by publisher contracts. INKR CMS reflects this complexity with publish settings that support country-level restrictions and multiple monetization models.

Media format awareness

Webtoon was growing rapidly on our platform, but its long, pageless format made the traditional page-by-page management interface a poor fit, leading to overlooked issues like page-tearing and misalignment. The new chapter detail view introduced seamless page stitching, letting editors preview webtoon content exactly as readers see it, while manga and comics retained the page-by-page approach.

Design

Results

After several months of implementation, the alpha was released to internal teams for catalog onboarding ahead of the INKR Comics launch. Reception was significantly better than INKR Backstage. INKR Comics launched in September 2020 with a catalog of 500 titles.