Dev Note: We Mirrored the VIBES Newsletter Inside an Open-Source Visual Builder

A sandbox experiment rebuilding the VIBES web and email layout inside GrapesJS, using six-month-old archived issues as the test content. This is a working note published in public, not a news story.

This is a development note, published to the live site on purpose. CurationsLA builds in public, and this post is the artifact of a sandbox experiment run on August 11, 2026. It will likely be deleted once it has served its purpose.

The question under test: can an open-source visual builder compose a VIBES issue without any of the design decisions leaking out of the design system?

What was built

The VIBES newsletter is already a block system. Its schema defines 26 block kinds, split cleanly between a fixed shell (masthead, navigation, ticker, footer, right rail) and a flexible editorial body (hero, HOV lanes, category sections, the daily trio of quote, history and trivia).

That separation is what makes a visual composer possible at all. The governing product law is blunt: editors choose what appears and in what legal order, and the system decides how everything looks. There are no font, color, spacing, width or CSS controls anywhere in the composer.

So the sandbox build removes the visual builder's entire style panel. The block palette is restricted to certified blocks only. Shell elements are locked against dragging and deleting. Where a color genuinely carries meaning, such as an HOV lane accent, the editor picks a semantic token like pink or lime, never a hex value.

Both channels were mirrored. The web channel renders the two-column desktop layout with the sticky right rail. The email channel renders a single 600 pixel column with the email-only chrome, and the presentation groupings that exist on web are flattened, because in email one block is one unit.

The part that actually matters

There is one breakpoint, at 1024 pixels. Below it, the right rail releases its sticky position, drops to a single column, and falls below the main flow. It never hides.

Which means the rail is not separate content. It is the same document placed differently, and below the fold a web reader sees it in the same order an email reader does. That single fact is why one composer can legitimately drive both channels without the two drifting apart.

None of this touches production rendering. The real VIBES renderer is byte-pinned by tests, and it stayed entirely outside the experiment. The sandbox composer emits semantic block JSON, not HTML, so a renderer always owns the visual output.

Publishing a dev note to the live site feels strange, and that is sort of the point. Building in public means the scaffolding shows sometimes. If you are reading this weeks from now, it probably should have been deleted already.

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