St. Brigid

Why it looks this way.

Typography

EB Garamond is a careful revival of Claude Garamond's type, the same family of letters used in missals and breviaries for four centuries. We use its old-style figures, so times like 10:30 sit in the line like printed text, and its italic for the names of feasts. Red Hat Text does the reading because it stays crisp and open at small sizes on old phones.

• EB Garamond headlines
• Red Hat Text body text

Color

The violet is the color of Advent and Lent vestments, and the deep orange is St. Brigid's flame, the fire her nuns kept burning at Kildare for centuries. Neutrals lean very slightly toward lavender, like light through Toledo-made glass. In the dark theme the violet lightens to a lilac so it reads as a color rather than a shadow.

• Page #F0EFF3
• Cards #FFFFFF
• Text #1E1A25
• Brand #4A2C5F
• Accent #A84D26

Layout

The two-tier header keeps daily Mass, confession, the address and the phone number in a thin strip on every page, because those are the four things people look up most. The main bar holds seven pages named in plain parish language, and the single button is Register with the parish, which is how a Catholic family formally joins.

Pages: Home, Mass times, Sacraments, Becoming Catholic, Need help?, Bulletin, Register

Hero

The home page opens on this week's calendar, not a photograph: seven columns with every Mass, confession time, holy hour and meeting, and today's column highlighted. A countdown names the next Mass. For a parish where some people come every single morning, the schedule is the most welcoming thing we can show.

Calls to action

Every action is a real parish task: Register with the parish, Request a sacrament, Come to an inquiry night, Ask St. Vincent de Paul for help. Registration gets the main button because everything else here depends on it, from baptism dates to a sponsor letter for a godparent.

Photography

We chose photographs of the Mass itself, the font, a First Communion veil, a hospital bedside and the pantry shelves, and kept candles to the places where a parish really lights them. The volunteer and portrait shots are stock stand-ins: the first thing we will ask the parish for is twenty minutes with a photographer at the 10:30 and on a pantry Thursday.

Accessibility

Body text is 18px with a 1.6 line height, every color pairing passes AA in both themes, and today's column in the schedule is marked with text as well as color. Mass times are written as text, never as images, so screen readers and translation tools can read them.