Thanks, California

We started working on a new style guide today. It’s amazing how clarifying that kind of effort can be. We made a short list of items to start with (colors, typography, buttons, text fields, etc). Already, we’ve found several great things to investigate before we can nail them down. The primary red we’re using in our designs (#ba160a) doesn’t match the one being used in production (#ba3f33), but is way prettier. Also, our element spacing and sizing doesn’t follow any kind of unit grid or convention. Plenty of fun stuff to dig in to!

I talked with one of our lawyers today about the giant legal “disclaimer” or explanation that lives in our website footer. He was super nice and helped me go through the actual requirements. Turns out, we have to have it on our site because of a California law (go figure). Anyway, I think we’ll be able to remove it from the footer and find some other strategic places to show it (yay).

It’s a good reminder that we should always ask; seek to understand why things are the way they are. We could have just left the text in the footer — nobody asked us to remove it. But everyone from the lawyer to the developers to the designers to the users are happy at the prospect of it being diminished.