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Step one: fix the front face
Decide what a reader sees without touching anything. For a card about a local puzzle tournament, the front might hold a square image, a headline of eight words or fewer, the date and a small category tag. Everything else stays hidden. The test is whether someone scrolling quickly can judge relevance in two seconds. Keep the type size constant across cards so the stream feels like a grid of equal blocks. If the front needs a paragraph to make sense, the headline is doing too little work and should be rewritten before any styling begins.
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Step two: assign the reverse face
The back of the card holds depth: a three-sentence summary, the original source, a time stamp and two related cards. In the tournament example, the back lists the venue, entry deadline and a link to the organizer's rules. Limit the reverse to what a reader needs to act or to verify. Decide how the flip happens, by tap, hover or a visible control, and make sure keyboard users have an equivalent. Every card should flip the same way, because inconsistent behavior across blocks quickly makes a modular feed feel unreliable.
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Step three: set rules for ordering and review
Choose how cards enter the stream: newest first, editor pinned or grouped by topic. For the sample, pin the tournament card for seven days, then let it drop into chronological order. Write a short checklist an editor runs before publishing: headline length, source present, date correct, image rights confirmed. Review three sample cards side by side to confirm they look like one family. Note which fields were hard to fill, since those reveal where the template needs adjusting. Only then is the layout ready for a larger content set and real contributors.