Bmj Platform Overhaul Master Plan Prompt

Source: bmj-platform-overhaul-master-plan-prompt.md (ingested 2026-03-28)

superpower:writing-plans

You are acting as a principal product strategist, creative director, systems auditor, information architect, UX lead, brand editor, and technical implementation planner for a full overhaul of The Black Male Journal platform.

Your task is not to give shallow advice. Your task is to produce a master execution blueprint for a complete platform overhaul, completion, audit, rewrite, and implementation roadmap.

You must think like someone inheriting an unfinished digital platform with partial work already done, unclear handoffs, possibly inconsistent routing, mixed layouts, uncertain governance assumptions, potentially scattered assets, and an incomplete translation of the brand’s ideological and aesthetic identity into product, design, content, and infrastructure.

You are to generate a single, comprehensive, structured plan that can guide Claude Code through design, architecture, content, data, navigation, governance, editorial, and storage decisions.

Do not be generic. Do not produce startup clichés. Do not flatten the political or cultural specificity of the brand. Do not default to sleek tech minimalism. Do not assume contemporary SaaS aesthetics are appropriate. This is a political media and educational institution with a print-culture visual language and a serious ideological center.

================================================== PROJECT CONTEXT

Organization: The Black Male Journal (BMJ)

Institutional nature: A nonprofit public-benefit media and educational organization centered on Black male life, political literacy, wellness, research, journalism, cultural analysis, and institutional self-governance.

Core institutional offerings include:

Articles, essays, and reports
Video content
Courses and workshops
Forums, clubs, and interest groups
Fee-for-service consultation
Membership structures
A future physical/in-person institutional phase

Primary service lenses:

Health / Wellness
Politics / Law
Culture / Philosophy
Technology / Entertainment
Business / Finance

Audience: Primarily Black boys and men, especially urban, digitally engaged cohorts roughly 16–45, with asymmetrical needs and varying levels of political, educational, legal, economic, and health-related engagement.

Institutional posture: BMJ is not just a content site. It is an interpretive institution. It should feel governed, serious, accountable, and ideologically coherent. It must communicate that Black men are stakeholders, not merely subjects of analysis.

Relevant business-plan themes that must shape your recommendations:

Mission-driven governance
Board oversight and contributor roles
Sustaining member participation
Political literacy and evidence-based content
Black male epistemology and accountability
Media + education as foundational public offerings
Trust-building through rigor, seriousness, utility, and consistency
Distinction from legacy media and adjacent institutions
Tiered access, membership, and long-term institutional growth

Treat this as a real overhaul for a partially built platform whose current state may contain:

unresolved tasks
unfinished handoffs
broken or inconsistent routes
inconsistent layouts and templates
unclear role permissions
weak asset management
incomplete Supabase storage discipline
placeholder content or absent imagery standards
mismatch between brand ideology and UI execution

================================================== PRIMARY QUESTIONS TO ANSWER

Your plan must explicitly answer all of the following:

What are the next steps?
What are the strongest strategic recommendations?
What unresolved tasks or likely missed handoffs should be assumed from earlier planning or partial development work?
Should a single administrator — specifically the chairman — have full control over the platform?
Are all links, routes, and navigation paths likely structured correctly, and how should they be audited and repaired?
Is there consistent layout and styling across pages and templates, and what system should enforce that?
Do we need a full color review and an imagery audit?
Should temporary placeholders use the chairman’s Instagram or LinkedIn photos and copied excerpts from his articles, and under what constraints?
Are all photos, logos, user data, articles, and related assets properly stored in Supabase, and how should that be audited and remediated?
What does a thorough overhaul and completion plan look like from strategy through implementation?

You must not answer these as a short FAQ. You must build a unified master plan that resolves them in sequence.

================================================== NON-NEGOTIABLE BRAND AND VISUAL DIRECTION

The visual language must be rooted in revolutionary print culture, not contemporary digital minimalism.

Primary visual references:

1960s–1970s liberation movement posters
Socialist and anti-colonial propaganda artwork
Radical newspapers
Underground press materials
Photocopy aesthetics
Screen-printing traditions

Visual traits:

Halftone dot patterns
Ink bleed
Rough print textures
Paper-like background tones
Posterized portrait treatments
Restricted, high-impact color schemes

Emotional and symbolic effect:

Authenticity
Collective identity
Historical continuity with struggle
A movement tradition rather than a lifestyle brand
Tangibility over digital gloss
Physical presence over polished corporate smoothness
Grassroots credibility
Cultural memory
The feeling of a political flyer, wheat-pasted poster, or radical newspaper rather than a polished venture-backed media property

Physical / tactile characteristics:

Warm off-white paper hues
Surface grain
Printing flaws
Rich ink texture
Slightly distressed or worn edges
A site that feels printed, handled, circulated, and lived with

Important: This does NOT mean the product should be messy, unusable, inaccessible, or technically unsound. It means the interface system must translate tactile and political print sensibilities into a disciplined modern web system without becoming generic.

================================================== OUTPUT REQUIREMENTS

Produce your answer as a master planning document with the following major sections. Be extremely detailed.

SECTION 1 — EXECUTIVE DIAGNOSIS Create a frank diagnosis of what is most likely wrong, incomplete, inconsistent, or at risk in a partially built BMJ platform given the context above. Identify likely categories of unfinished work:

product definition drift
weak governance mapping
incomplete routing
page/template inconsistency
poor content modeling
unstructured media storage
weak placeholder standards
missing editorial states
unclear permissions
broken or non-systematic design language
absent QA and handoff documentation
lack of asset provenance rules
lack of distinction between public, member, contributor, and admin experiences

This section should read like a senior operator taking over an unfinished build.

SECTION 2 — ASSUMED MISSED HANDOFFS AND UNRESOLVED TASKS Construct a detailed list of likely unresolved tasks that often get missed between planning, design, and engineering on projects like this. Include:

page inventory not reconciled with sitemap
route names not aligned with content architecture
duplicate or dead-end navigation states
components created without design tokens
layouts drifting across templates
content types not normalized
article/media metadata incomplete
contributor workflow undefined
role permissions too broad or too narrow
Supabase buckets created without policy clarity
placeholder assets used without naming conventions
absent editorial review states
homepage and landing pages not aligned with strategy
missing CTA hierarchy
no canonical image specs
unreviewed mobile layout issues
no audit trail for uploads and replacements
untracked debt from earlier iterations

For each unresolved area, include:

why it matters
what symptoms to look for
what corrective action should be taken

SECTION 3 — GOVERNANCE AND PLATFORM CONTROL You must directly address the question: “Should a single administrator, specifically the chairman, have full control over the platform?”

Do NOT answer simplistically. Provide a nuanced recommendation with:

risks of total centralized control
benefits of centralized emergency authority
risks of diffusion without accountability
difference between legal authority, editorial authority, platform authority, and operational authority
recommended governance model for BMJ specifically
recommended permissions matrix

Design a governance/permissions model that includes at minimum:

Chairman
Board-level governance or oversight role
Editor / managing editor
Contributor / writer / researcher
Media producer
Membership/community manager
Technical administrator
Super admin / break-glass emergency role

Explain what each role can and cannot do.

Recommend whether the chairman should have:

ownership access
emergency override access
editorial publishing power
infrastructure deletion power
user-data export power
billing/platform secrets access

Then propose the safest BMJ-specific model balancing trust, continuity, institution-building, and operational resilience.

SECTION 4 — INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, ROUTES, LINKS, AND NAVIGATION AUDIT Design a complete audit framework for verifying whether all links use correct routes and whether navigation paths are coherent.

Include:

how to inventory every page, route, layout, and template
how to identify orphan pages
how to identify route duplication
how to normalize slugs and naming patterns
how to separate public routes, member-only routes, contributor/admin routes
how to structure canonical paths for:
- home
- about
- mission / theory / ethics
- chairman
- articles
- article detail pages
- essays / reports / series
- video
- workshops / courses
- forums / clubs
- memberships
- business directory
- consultations
- contact
- donate / support
- account
- dashboard
- contributor/admin back office

You must recommend a navigation hierarchy:

primary nav
secondary nav
footer nav
contextual nav
mobile nav
member dashboard nav
editorial/admin nav

Also specify:

breadcrumb rules
CTA placement logic
internal linking strategy between articles, lenses of service, contributors, and programs
rules for redirects, 404s, archived content, and legacy URLs

SECTION 5 — LAYOUT SYSTEM AND VISUAL CONSISTENCY Create a full framework for auditing and enforcing consistency across layouts and templates.

Cover:

page shells
grid systems
content widths
section spacing
heading hierarchy
image ratios
card systems
CTA modules
quote blocks
article templates
profile pages
course/workshop pages
membership pages
directory entries
donor/support pages
admin views

Identify common failure modes:

multiple competing button styles
inconsistent hero treatments
typography drift
arbitrary spacing
inconsistent states
cards behaving differently across content types
modals/sheets not matching brand language
articles and essays lacking a coherent reading experience
mobile and desktop divergence

Then define a design-system enforcement model:

tokens
typography scale
spacing scale
component library
template library
state guidelines
accessibility rules
editorial display rules

SECTION 6 — COLOR REVIEW AND IMAGE AUDIT You must explicitly recommend whether a color review is needed and whether an imagery audit is needed. The answer should be yes, and you must define the full process.

Part A: Color review Develop a politically and aesthetically coherent color audit process. Address:

restricted palette strategy
dominant vs accent colors
print-culture references without becoming parody
contrast/accessibility
palette meaning and emotional role
when to use red, black, off-white, ochre, muted gold, deep brown, faded ink blues, or other tones if appropriate
how to avoid over-saturating the experience
how to make digital interfaces feel printed and tactile

Part B: Imagery audit Define how imagery should be reviewed across:

chairman imagery
contributor portraits
article hero images
background textures
historical references
logos and marks
social preview images
thumbnails
member/community imagery

Explicitly address temporary placeholder policy. Answer whether it is acceptable to use:

the chairman’s Instagram photos
the chairman’s LinkedIn photos
copied excerpts from his articles

Your answer must include:

legal/rights considerations
brand-quality considerations
cropping/consistency standards
when placeholders are acceptable
how placeholders must be labeled/tracked
sunset rules for replacing them
file naming rules
alt text and metadata rules

Also recommend portrait treatment styles aligned to the brand:

halftone
duotone/posterization
cutout silhouettes
rough border treatments
archival framing
newspaper-style captioning

SECTION 7 — SUPABASE STORAGE, DATA, AND ASSET GOVERNANCE You must assume the project uses Supabase and design a complete audit/remediation framework for whether all assets are properly stored.

Cover:

photos
logos
icons
article images
author images
PDFs
video metadata
user-uploaded assets
member data
article records
role/permission data
event/course records
forum/community data
drafts and editorial versions
backups and export logic

Design a clear storage model:

which things belong in database tables
which things belong in storage buckets
which things need signed URLs
which things must never be public
which things can be cached or CDN-served
how to structure bucket names
folder naming patterns
provenance metadata
versioning/replacement rules
soft delete vs hard delete
retention rules
audit logs
row-level security considerations
PII separation
admin-upload workflow

Require a full Supabase audit checklist that includes:

bucket inventory
public/private classification
policy review
duplicate asset detection
broken URL detection
unused asset detection
oversized asset detection
missing metadata
inconsistent file naming
missing alt text associations
orphaned DB records
orphaned storage files
direct-to-storage upload policy review
secret management review
backup/restore readiness

SECTION 8 — CONTENT MODEL AND EDITORIAL SYSTEM Design the content architecture BMJ needs.

Model at minimum:

articles
essays
reports
videos
interviews
workshops
courses
memberships
forums/clubs
consultations
contributor profiles
chairman profile
service lenses
series
tags/topics
resources
events
testimonials if applicable
support/donation content
organizational pages

For each content type, specify:

required fields
optional fields
SEO fields
display fields
editorial state fields
asset relationships
author/contributor relationships
visibility states
member-only gating states

Also define editorial workflow states such as:

draft
internal review
fact check
legal/sensitivity review where needed
scheduled
published
archived
revised
withdrawn

Preserve BMJ’s emphasis on evidence, seriousness, distinction between journalism, analysis, commentary, advocacy, and educational material.

SECTION 9 — BRAND TRANSLATION INTO DIGITAL EXPERIENCE Explain how to faithfully translate BMJ’s print-revolutionary visual ideology into the product system without making it feel amateur or inaccessible.

Cover:

typography recommendations by function
display type vs reading type
page rhythm
paper texture usage
halftone usage
distress usage
iconography style
motion principles
hover/focus interaction tone
microcopy tone
social card style
article header style
PDF/report design continuity
how to preserve seriousness and readability for long-form content

Specify what to avoid:

startup gradients
luxury-magazine slickness
generic editorial templates
overdesigned activism aesthetics
excessive texture that impairs readability
fake grit with no system logic
random collage without hierarchy

SECTION 10 — PAGE-BY-PAGE OVERHAUL PLAN Create a page-by-page overhaul matrix.

At minimum include recommendations for:

homepage
about
mission/vision/theory of change
ethics/code of ethics
chairman page
contributors page
articles index
single article page
reports/resources page
video/media page
courses/workshops page
memberships page
forums/clubs page
consultation page
support/donate page
contact page
user account area
member dashboard
admin/editorial dashboard

For each page specify:

strategic purpose
priority audience
primary CTA
secondary CTA
must-have sections
visual tone
content dependencies
data dependencies
likely current problems
recommended fix

SECTION 11 — IMPLEMENTATION PHASES Turn everything into a practical execution roadmap.

Break into phases such as: Phase 0: discovery and audit Phase 1: governance and permissions Phase 2: IA/routes/content model Phase 3: design system and visual language Phase 4: Supabase storage/data cleanup Phase 5: page template rebuild Phase 6: editorial/content migration Phase 7: QA and accessibility Phase 8: launch hardening Phase 9: post-launch governance and operations

For each phase include:

objectives
outputs
dependencies
risks
decision gates
deliverables

SECTION 12 — QA, ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA, AND DEFINITION OF DONE Create a ruthless QA framework. Include:

route audit complete
no broken internal links
consistent layout tokens
mobile parity
accessibility compliance
asset storage normalized
metadata completeness
placeholder tracking complete
role permissions validated
admin actions logged
editorial states functional
all core page templates aligned to system
imagery reviewed
color system approved
launch checklist satisfied

Define “done” in a way that prevents vague partial completion.

SECTION 13 — FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS End with:

the top 10 most urgent actions
the top 10 structural risks if these are ignored
the recommended governance stance on chairman control
the recommended stance on placeholder imagery and article excerpts
the recommended stance on Supabase storage discipline
the single clearest principle that should govern the entire overhaul

================================================== STYLE OF THE RESPONSE

Your output must be:

highly structured
long-form
explicit
operational
design-literate
governance-literate
technically aware
politically and aesthetically sensitive to BMJ’s ideological posture

Do not hedge with “it depends” unless you then resolve the dependency with a recommendation. Do not just list ideas. Build a real plan. Do not be neutral about weak design or weak governance. Where tradeoffs exist, name them and choose a direction. Assume the platform needs disciplined completion, not vague brainstorming.

================================================== SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS

When discussing chairman control, do not default to founder absolutism and do not default to bureaucracy. Recommend a resilient institutional model.

When discussing placeholder photos from Instagram or LinkedIn, treat them as temporary editorial assets requiring rights/provenance review, naming conventions, and replacement tracking.

When discussing copied excerpts from the chairman’s articles, distinguish between:

excerpts used as owned editorial content
excerpts reused as design placeholders
attribution, source tracking, and replacement rules

When discussing the visual system, ensure the result feels like a living political print tradition translated into the web, not nostalgia cosplay.

When discussing infrastructure, assume this must be sustainable, auditable, and safe for a nonprofit institution handling users, members, contributors, and potentially sensitive data.

Now produce the full master planning document.