GIC

Using Lighthouse …to Navigate!

We chose the name Lighthouse for our new state website design system for several reasons. It’s a nod to the many Delaware lighthouses that dot our beautiful coastlines, like the Harbor of Refuge Lighthouse in Lewes, seen above. Symbolically, a lighthouse is a comforting landmark to help sailors orient themselves, avoid trouble and find their […]

An Iconic Change in the Works…

Happy Halloween! We here at the GIC will be spending the holiday down in the laboratory, working feverishly on our fiendish plan to unify the look and feel of Delaware state agency websites! Among the things we’re working on is integrating new visual elements into the Lighthouse design system. These elements must meet accessibility standards […]

Unveiling our New State Branding

We’re going to step back a bit from our usual focus with this post. While we’ve detailed some of the upgrades coming to many Delaware state websites through our new design system called Lighthouse, there are other improvements in the works that are also worth calling out. We’ve already shared the new website header, which […]

State vs. Agency Notifications:
Let’s Divide and Conquer!

Notification banners are a valuable way to alert website users to important information. However, these features are often used inconsistently across Delaware agency sites. Banners intended for emergency notifications are often used for non-emergency information, like event notification or links to existing pages on their sites. Here’s an example of useful and important information that […]

Choosing New Fonts for Lighthouse

One of the GIC’s main goals is to put accessibility at the forefront of our process. We always want to keep in mind those with visual, hearing and other disabilities as we make each website design decision. This approach calls for reconsideration of colors, backgrounds, and the text itself that we use. Many different fonts […]

End of Summer Dev Updates

Hello again! The GIC team is engaged in an important internal debate, agonizing over a hotly-contested issue: Is it actually summer until September 22 as the calendar says, or do Labor Day and the start of school mark the real beginning of fall? Our team is split into devoted camps of those who are still […]

Mid-August Lighthouse Dev Updates

The GIC team is hard at work, building our new Lighthouse design system. Every couple of weeks we’ll be checking in with a brief update on some of the more interesting aspects of our development efforts. Here’s what we’re working on now! Our web team has been building new components for Lighthouse, including: Let’s dig […]

Designing a New Header & Footer

Previous iterations of the Delaware State Common Look and Feel (CLF) provided a consistent header and footer for state agency websites to use, such as the ones on this webpage. Our new version of the CLF is called Lighthouse. Lighthouse represents a comprehensive design system that will unify even more elements of state websites. This […]