East Coast Catalyst

Atlantic Library

Putting website management back in the hands of the client.

Time to read: ~2 minutes

Project Background

Atlantic was the core product offering of the East Coast Catalyst design agency during my tenure. It’s a library of flexible website building blocks that are styled to match a client’s brand identity and added to WordPress or Drupal, streamlining a client’s ability to build and edit their website.

Challenges

Atlantic was created by different designers for multiple years, creating inconsistencies in the file labelling and styling.
Due to the small team size, lengthy periods of client work would delay Atlantic development, causing a large backlog of feature updates to form over time.

Solutions

To remove the inconsistencies. we split the design team in two, allowing half to work on client projects while the other half would meticulously clean Atlantic layer by layer.
To prevent the backlog from growing further, we halted core additions to client projects, allowing us to make the updates we needed between clients.

Responsibilities

Conducted a thorough audit and cleaning of Atlantic’s color usage, spacing, fonts and other internal tokens.
Created new components and variants to give clients the most customization possible.
Maintained a consistent grid between components and screen sizes.
Tested Atlantic by styling a full website for a prospective client from scratch. Including ADA compliant fonts, spacing and color styles for every block, a full icon library, and a set of pre-built pages to easily launch a site from.
Regularly performed QA on Atlantic development and tracked bugs.