A web designer shares their experience working with a client's brand guidelines PDF for Portico Investments, critiquing its lack of practical guidance for web work. The guidelines lacked colour system logic, typographic hierarchy, and interactive state definitions. The designer reworked the colour palette by removing pure black/white, adjusting greens, and adding accent colours. They also replaced the high-contrast serif The Seasons with Calibra for better readability across sizes. The post argues that traditional brand guidelines PDFs are relics designed for print and have little relevance to web projects, which is why the designer creates an HTML/CSS design guide at the start of every project instead.
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