Back when I was wandering around America in August, I mentioned that I met up with Mike Migurski in San Francisco:
I played truant from UX Week this morning to meet up with Mike for a coffee and a chat at Cafe Vega. We were turfed out when the bearded, baseball-capped, Draplinesque barista announced he had to shut the doors because he needed to “run out for some milk.” So we went around the corner to the Code For America office.
It wasn’t just a social visit. Mike wanted to chat about the possibility of working with Clearleft. The Code for America site was being overhauled. The new site needed to communicate directly with volunteers, rather than simply being a description of what Code for America does. But the site also needed to be able to change and adapt as the organisation’s activities expanded. So what they needed was not a set of page designs; they needed a system of modular components that could be assembled in a variety of ways.
This was music to my ears. This sort of systems-thinking is exactly the kind of work that Clearleft likes to get its teeth into. I showed Mike some of the previous work we had done in creating pattern libraries, and it became pretty clear that this was just what they were looking for.
When I got back to Brighton, Clearleft assembled as small squad to work on the project. Jon would handle the visual design, with the branding work of Dojo4 as a guide. For the front-end coding, we brought in some outside help. Seeing as the main deliverable for this project was going to be a front-end style guide, who better to put that together than the person who literally wrote the book on front-end style guides: Anna.
I’ll go into more detail about the technical side of things on the Clearleft blog (and we’ll publish the pattern library), but for now, let me just say that the project was a lot of fun, mostly because the people we were working with at Code for America—Mike, Dana, and Cyd—were so ridiculously nice and easy-going.
Anna and Jon would start the day by playing the unofficial project theme song and then get down to working side-by-side. By the end of the day here in Brighton, everyone was just getting started in San Francisco. So the daily “stand up” conference call took place at 5:30pm our time; 9:30am their time. The meetings rarely lasted longer than 10 or 15 minutes, but the constant communication throughout the project was invaluable. And the time difference actually worked out quite nicely: we’d tell them what we had been working on during our day, and if we needed anything from them; then they could put that together during their day so it was magically waiting for us by the next morning.
It’ll be a while yet before the new site rolls out, but in the meantime they’ve put together an alpha site—with a suitably “under construction” vibe—so that anyone can help out with the code and content by making contributions to the github repo.
