Folders hold contexts. Grids hold destinations.
- Use folders for broad areas such as Work, Home, Travel, or Creative
- Use grids for the focused set of places needed in one mode
- Keep the most-used grid available without opening another layer
A visual bookmark system
Organize by where your mind is going next.
A bookmark collection becomes useful when its structure matches the way you work. The goal is not to file every link perfectly. It is to make the next destination obvious.
Written by Joey Wright, the designer and photographer who built SpeedGrid after years of trying to make existing new-tab tools fit this workflow.
The useful hierarchy
Give every layer exactly one job.
Cards should be recognizable before you read them.
- Let logos, colors, and position create a repeatable map
- Put related destinations next to each other
- Give one card two destinations when they belong to the same idea
Three decisions
Start with context, frequency, and visual weight.
Context
Separate work from personal browsing before you sort anything else. If two sets of sites support different versions of your day, they should not compete on the same grid.
Frequency
Promote daily destinations to the first screen. Keep occasional tools one layer deeper. A visual system feels calm when frequency determines distance.
Visual weight
Use strong artwork and stable positions for the places you open constantly. Quiet cards can handle utilities you recognize by location alone.
A 20-minute reset
Build the first useful version—not the final one.
A good visual bookmark system improves through use. Start with the destinations that already shape your day, then let friction tell you what to move.
- 1
Collect the real daily set.
Write down the sites you opened yesterday. This produces a more honest starting point than sorting an entire bookmark archive.
- 2
Create one grid for one mode.
Begin with Work, Home, or whichever context you enter most often. Twelve clear destinations are more useful than a perfect taxonomy.
- 3
Pair destinations that share an identity.
A client portal and its Drive folder, an inbox and compose screen, or a store and its admin page can share one visual card with two named targets.
- 4
Arrange by habit, not alphabet.
Put frequent destinations where your eyes and pointer naturally land. Preserve that position so recognition becomes automatic.
- 5
Review after a week.
Move anything you keep hunting for. Remove anything you never touch. The system should reflect actual behavior instead of an imagined perfectly organized future.
What to avoid
More organization is not always more clarity.
Skip folders that contain only one grid, categories you cannot name without thinking, duplicate cards for closely related destinations, and decorative variation that makes important shortcuts harder to recognize. The best structure disappears while you use it.
Make one screen useful today
Turn your next tab into a map you already understand.
SpeedGrid is free for three grids and one folder. Build the daily set first, then expand only when the structure earns it.
Add SpeedGrid to Chrome