Category: Design

‘Twas the Night Before WCAG!

By GIC on December 18th, 2024

‘Twas the holiday season and all ’round the spot Not a creature was crawling, not even a ‘bot! Agency staffers were snug in their beds but questions of access swirled round in their heads… “How shall we keep up with the changing constraints? Our intentions are good, but designers we ain’t!” When, from my computer, […]

There Goes My Hero!

By GIC on December 12th, 2024

Super Delly is the hero we all need. He’s here to save the day, as it pertains to making your homepage as inviting and accessible as possible! For the sake of clarity, the hero section that we’re actually going to be talking about is the large image and text beneath the header; essentially, your homepage’s […]

Thankful for Sharing!

By GIC on November 26th, 2024

One of the things we’re most thankful for at the GIC is the opportunity to help Delaware agencies share important information with the widest possible audience. The development of the Lighthouse design system is going to benefit agencies and visitors through content organization, efficiency improvements, and increased accessibility standards. That all adds up to inviting […]

Using Lighthouse …to Navigate!

By GIC on November 15th, 2024

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…

By GIC on October 31st, 2024

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

By GIC on October 17th, 2024

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!

By GIC on October 04th, 2024

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

By GIC on September 19th, 2024

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 […]

Mid-August Lighthouse Dev Updates

By GIC on August 15th, 2024

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

By GIC on August 05th, 2024

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 […]