Maag France

MAAG France was founded by journalist Maria Sidelnikova. After moving to Paris she started as a blogger, grew that into a personal brand, and then took the next step: a full online media outlet about Paris. It is a Russian-language website on French culture and city life, publishing interviews, reviews, exhibition coverage, guides, an events calendar, and opinion columns.

What sets it apart is the quality of the writing. The reviews and interviews come from people with deep expertise in culture and dance: Maria herself and a circle of invited authors. This is cultural criticism by specialists, not aggregated listings. The site is live and growing, with new pieces every week and new formats added regularly.

The job was to turn a personal author brand into a website for a publication. It had to keep the founder’s recognizable voice while giving equal weight to invited authors, supporting multiple genres, and handling a constant flow of content. Long-form reviews and interviews are the core product, so reading comfort and typography mattered as much as the visual identity. The tone needed to feel Parisian without postcard clichés, and restrained enough to let the writing and photography lead.

Topics covered

• Art and exhibitions: the Louvre, Grand Palais, Centre Pompidou, the art market
• Ballet, dance, theatre, opera, classical music
• Architecture and the city
• Fashion and fine jewellery
• Food and restaurants
• Books and photography
• Addresses, guides, and practical tips
• City events and calendar

Educated Russian-speaking readers in France and across Europe. They live in or regularly visit the local cultural scene and go to exhibitions, theatre, and the opera. They value an informed point of view over a news feed. What they want from the site is context, not only “what to see in Paris.”

What I did

Concept and visual direction. I worked with the founder on the site’s positioning and visual character: a calm, magazine-quality reading experience built for the web.

Sketches, palette, accents. I produced and narrowed down a series of sketches, then defined the colour palette and an accent system. The accents distinguish sections without competing with the imagery.

Logo. I designed the logo and its adaptations, including a full version and a compact one for mobile.

Design system. Once the key decisions were approved, I built the design system the developer uses to build the site. It covers a wide range of formats: news, features, interviews, first-person columns, guides, tips, visual stories, photo reportages, and an events calendar. Each format gets its own presentation within one coherent system.

How it works today The project evolves iteratively. New formats appear as the team of authors grows, and the design system expands with them rather than being specified upfront for every case.

What’s next

• English and French content. The system will need to handle three languages with different headline lengths and typographic conventions.
• Beyond text. The site plans to scale into content forms beyond articles and photo stories.