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 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 in 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.
