In 2014, Cogneedo was given the task of creating a "cool and not at all boring" site for dealership compliance lawyers to view news and communicate with each other. I found inspiration in a local parking garage, using bright yellow as an accent color to complement a very familiar "lawyer blue" scheme.
The first round of ideas gave birth to elements that would later be combined and tweaked.
As the site design was refined and we started to build it, we had to tweak the design to fit what we could actually do with the limitations of our platforms (WordPress for the site content and Discourse for the discussion forum).
Not shown is the technical backend where we merged the ADCO WordPress login with the Discourse login to create a seamless experience for the end user.
Above: Images from the development proces. Still working out kinks with the search bar and figuring out how to implement the angled sign in button and search button.
Below: Aforementioned kinks worked out, but another issue came to my attention. The yellow border on the navbar showed through the chevron below the logo.
This closeup shows a trick I did with the transparency in the navbar. Since the navigation used a transluscent background and an opaque bottom border, the transluscent chevron at the bottom of the navbar showed the yellow border through the image (As seen in the images above this one). So instead of having the navbar be completely transluscent, I used a gradient that became opaque near the bottom edge of the navbar, and then mirrored that gradient on the chevron image to obscure the yellow line at the top of the chevron image.
