Georgia on my mind
Seldom does serendipity smile so kindly—but I won’t question it. The chance to work with one of the top state digital service teams on typographic and design system refinement and integration is pretty special...
Having been in the Drupal world for many years, it’s hard not to know the Digital Services team in Georgia. I met Nikhil, Kendra, and Heather a few years back at one DrupalCon or another (maybe New Orleans?). They were hosting an informal session for others working on government sites on Drupal, and at the time I was collaborating on a proposal for Rhode Island (where I live), and also running the team at Isovera—where we were providing Drupal training and development consulting to the Mass.gov folks as part of their new platform development and rollout. It was pretty clear that the Georgia team was doing some really good work, and it was a pleasure getting to know them. I’ve followed their progress ever since.
Flash forward to earlier this year, and following my own decision to leave Isovera and focus more on typographic and design system consulting—I was tremendously excited by a conversation with Nikhil about helping them with that very focus. They are in the midst of an ambitious project to completely redesign and develop a new platform for all of their state agency sites, based in PatternLab and Drupal 8. They have already been working with two outstanding partners: IDEO (design) and Lullabot (content strategy and development), and much great work has been done. I’ve worked with Lullabot before, and everyone on the team are amongst the nicest and most talented folks I know (like Greg, Jeff, Marissa, and Marc to name just a few).
The opportunity was to get my input on the overall typographic system, help navigate some font licensing questions and options, and if possible see if we could integrate variable fonts into the equation. Given that the front-end team at Lullabot were already embracing new capabilities in CSS like Grid, it seemed a perfect opportunity to weave them together and create an even more flexible design system.
We’ve been working together for a little while now and I’m so impressed with the DSGa team and how well the collaboration is going between all the partners. It’s a fantastic project that will improve the lives of every citizen in the state for years to come, and that means a lot. I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to be part of the team that brings it to life.