California Forever
A New City in California
You may have read about California Forever in the New York Times — a company founded to build America’s first new major city since the 1960s. Since its founding in 2017, the company has assembled nearly 70,000 acres – over 100 square miles – in California’s Solano County, between San Francisco and Sacramento. Their goal is to reboot the California Dream, by bringing great jobs and affordable homes to a region that needs both.
The California Forever team reached out to Grain & Mortar for a new website as their current site was from the early days of going public with the project and was no longer meeting their needs visually or functionally. The kicker – they needed the new site up fast. But for such a unique opportunity, how could we say no?
The biggest challenge was not the subject matter, nor the visuals, nor the technical lift…it was the timeframe. The size and scope of this project would typically take around four months, and we had forty-five days. So needless to say, it was a sprint.
We reworked plenty of visual assets. The new city isn’t built yet, so we didn’t have real photos to work with – only renderings. To bring in a human element to the overall design, we infused some hand-drawn elements with the icon style, charts and graphs, textured overlays, and videos to bring the vision to life while recognizing that planning for the new city is still a work in progress.
We focused on bringing clarity to the message by suggesting new headlines and using our outside perspective to identify areas needing more clarity. From there we restructured, trimmed unnecessary copy or rewrote text to make sure the message was delivered coherently.
Due to the quick timeline, we collaborated with a trusted development partner, Plumb Web Strategy, on the development portion of the project. The biggest technical feature on the site was a robust endorsement form that allowed residents and businesses who wanted to display their support to upload text, image, or video endorsements. The form allowed them to upload an image or video in addition to their text, and the submission automatically generated a draft post to the support wall. From there, the California Forever team could quickly moderate the endorsements by approving and publishing the post.
