Chicago

Turn and face the strange

Here’s all the new and wonderful stuff the Design Office has been working on:

April

2020-04-02, Thursday

• Continued development of our Chicago’s COVID-19 Response presence, including translation and charting services.

March

2020 March

• We launched Chicago’s COVID-19 Response and migrated our team to telework.

2020-03-04, Wednesday

• We launched a new Chicago Design System, people.

February

Beginning in February, changelog will be updated on Thursdays.

2020-02-20, 2-27 Thursday

• Cranking away for launch. Policy & Strategery.

2020-02-13 Thursday

• Drafted a sprint plan for all milestones supporting the digital launch of the new design system on March 4th, including post-launch activities. Upcoming milestones are available here: https://github.com/Chicago/design-cds-bootstrap/milestones
• Reviewing our Figma files and team presence in preparation for launch.
• Debriefed internally on Aldermanic Committee websites to determine our approach and support requirements.
• Met with Graphics team to continue discussion of how we can roll out our brand internally and externally. More exciting work here soon.

2020-02-06 Thursday

• Produced multiple versions of new 311 logo for social media.
• Sprint planning for our next round of sprints, and pushed our latest Bootstrap 4 theme code to our CDN.
• Attended Figma conference for the City and presented a talk. I learned of new features and enhancements to Figma which should make us more efficient and effective in designing interfaces.
• Debriefed with City Clerk’s office on plans for Aldermanic Committee websites, since we have fielded requests for new sites from these committees recently.
• Addressed North Central College class in an online Q&A presentation about design in social spaces.

January

2020-01-31 Friday

• Help various Mayor’s Office initiatives plan to utilize user engagement methods and resources to gather feedback in upcoming public meetings.
• Support for the Mayor’s Newsletter & web page support, newsletter published Friday.
• Reviewed and provided design feedback on the Violence Prevention Dashboard production site as it is readied for launch.
• Design support for launch of the Chicago Design System. Launch upcoming.
• Finished presentation for Config, the first Figma conference. Very excited.
• Worked with 311 and OEMC on logo lockups for new print and social designs they have coming out. Rad!
• In progress on producing an overaall viewpoint for our teams (AIS) to use in responding to branding questions from departments.

2020-01-24 Friday

• Lots of internal re-alignment as we roll through the AIS merger.

2020-01-17 Friday

• Met with the Graphics Reproduction and Print team to share a bit more about how we work. I learned the team produced 40mm prints last year, half of which the team designed. I shared a bit about my work, but left feeling like I hadn’t done a great job.
• Bootstrap 4 theme progress is okay, with a few minor items to clean up or verify for a solid alpha launch. Content Delivery Network deployment is the theme of milestone 5. You can see all our milestones. Most of the CDN work is here.
• Got a cold so was out for a day.
• Met with BACP & a consortium of teams (Mayor’s Office, Police, U of Chicago) on a Violence Prevention Dashboard. In each case, we reviewed design issues for each product & group, offered specific advice on their issues, and then explained how the Chicago Design System work can help them produce good looking, accessible work.

2020-01-10 Friday

• Lots of meetings and writeups of the Chicago Design System, for BACP’s Chicago Business Direct and a few other upcoming projects, including an awesome Violence Dashboard.

2020-01-03 Friday

2020, huh?

• Short week for the design office, mostly administrivia and planning for next year.

December

2019-12-27 Friday

• Short week for the design office, mostly administrivia and planning for next year.
• Improvements to our social sharing icon on Twitter.

2019-12-20 Friday

• Published our year end accomplishments, re-issued an RFP, pushed out another year end program site.

2019-12-13 Friday

W I C K E D… Freaky Friday!

• This week was a lot of year end wrap up and transition to our new team, the Department of Assets, Information, & Services.

2019-12-06 Friday

• Last week was a lot of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Design Thinking training for DoIT staff.
• We also spent time with the Every Youth Connected program, working to provide a beautiful quilt of equitable summer programming for Chicago’s children across our 77 neighborhoods.
• Oh, and we sprint planned and made some templates! Go team.

November

2019-11-29 Friday

• Updated design.chicago.gov due to some snarky but accurate community feedback.
• Reviewed a cool map application soon to be released by the Department of Planning & Development and their technology partner.
• Supported internal rollout of a change to our IT processes through the start of an intranet site. Whoa, SharePoint.
• Reviewed an ambitious proposal for how to go about reorganizing our digital information.
• Slept off Thanksgiving feast (short week, with Friday off).

2019-11-22 Friday

• Whoops, fixed chicagodesignsystem.org so it resolves to design.chicago.gov securely.
• Worked with our design partner on v2 of Census 2020.
• Integrated CHI.GOV with bit.ly, testing to follow shortly…
• Blown away by crazy good DePaul Design class presentation, more to come shortly.

2019-11-15 Friday

• v0.9 hit the streets. WHAT?!?
• Hammered out some SASS rendering issues that were driving me crazy. Computers are fun until they do what you unintentionally tasked them to do.
• Learning about Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Went to Google’s Chicago Office to chat about tech. Thanks for the yogurt & fancy water!

2019-11-08 Friday

• Presented our system to the Mayor for approval. Got it.
• Presented our system to the Mayor’s Office for implementation planning.
• Coding coding coding on that Bootstrap 4 Chicago Design System theme.

2019-11-01 Friday

WHAT THE WHAT WHAT? ALL SAINTS DAY, THAT’S WHAT.

Oh, yeah, GitHub Bootstrap Chicago Design System Theme, baby! Coming to a theater near you!

October

2019-10-25 Friday

Lots of conversations about accessibility and budgeting, most of them depressing but informative. Given our resource constraints, we will need to really focus and work with our teams, departments, and vendors to ensure digital accessibility consistently.

Also, we’re going to trash the work we’ve done in establishing USWDS 1.0 as our baseline, and move to a Bootstrap 4 theme. More on that once I blog more for realz.

2019-10-18 Friday

Read like 700 pages of RFP responses, nearly died. Made a movie about how much we like Frontify. Used Frontify to distribute a bunch of brand assets. Took a vacation.

2019-10-11 Friday

Production, production, production, production. production. This website is chuggin’ along!

2019-10-04 Friday

Happy Octember, when it still kinda feels like summer, but winter’s sharp teeth catch you at the start of end of the day. Anyway, last week was an “exciting” week of trimming budgets and managing expectations, two keys for government work.

Refinement of color profiles as we begin shipping items from the Chicago Design System, and writing up lots of how to and launch notes. Exciting times. Who knew distributing fonts via remote updates could be so exciting?

Also, lots of planning for rollout. Lots. And lots. Of scribbles on napkins.

September

2019-09-27 Friday

• We bid our lovely and talented intern Abigal Lammers and our September work adieu as we update the changelog for a last time in September and the first time this fall.

  What did we do? Corrected, refresh, and refined content and display of design.chicago.gov, including a new card-driven home page and card style, and lots of color correcting, re-correcting, and over correcting. It has now been corrected.

  

2019-09-20 Friday

• Launched design.chicago.gov, including messing around with DNS changes, Jekyll configuration settings, and all other kinds of gross code. Ew!

2019-09-13 Friday

• Round 90 of the payment calculator. Now it’s a web page. Soon it will explain many things about the Mayor’s new payment plan.
• Design System, Design System, Design System.
• Census 2020 support.

2019-09-06 Friday

• Accessibility test on the policy & procedures portal intranet. Ouch! Back to the drawing board on parts of this one, with an upgrade or change coming. Thanks to Claudia & Peter from Great Lakes ADA Center for the assist in testing!
• That payment calculator isn’t going anywhere.
• New & exciting upcoming collaborations with DePaul University.
• Secret design stuff.

August

2019-08-30 Friday

• Vacation, baby. It was great!

2019-08-23 Friday

• Payment calculator round two. This is going to be a case study, I think.
• Finished our first draft of an holistic approach to RULA: readability, usability, language access, and accessibility for City of Chicago digital services.

2019-08-16 Friday

• Ate team’s weight in bbq at DoIT Picnic.
• Struggled to maintain consciousness.
• Created a prototype to address content and interaction design challenges in navigating our ticket payment and vehicle payment plan website, in addition to prototyping a ticket payment calculator.

2019-08-08 Thursday

• Emcee’d ThinkChicago’s design challenge with Beth Bond. Tons of fun!
• Evaluated accessibility of an internal and an external application.
• Reached out to a website visitor to get context on more accessibility issues.
• Planning to update colors on chicago.gov to be more accessible.

July

2019-07-30 Tuesday

Administrivia abounds, as we worked on:

• our Master Consulting Agreement
• a website redesign proposal
• a memo and presentation regarding the city’s identity
• investigated an approach to translation as a service for city web applications

2019-07-17 Wednesday

• Updated the 311 Open Roadmap

2019-07-12 Friday

• Launched first version of Census 2020 website, final version available at Census 2020 website.