Why Seedline Network looks the way it does
Seedline is a network that recruits, trains, pays and coaches church planters along the Front Range. Its visitors are mostly pastors weighing a decision that will shape a decade of their family's life, so the site reads like a careful report rather than a recruitment poster.
- Built for
- Prospective planters and their spouses, pastors of established churches thinking about sending someone, and individual donors who fund residencies.
- Navigation
- Contents column. A right-hand contents list tracks where you are on long pages, the way a well-made book or report does.
- Pages
- Home, Become a planter, The churches, Sending churches, Coaches & staff, Field notes
- Hero
- a short action form as the hero: the one thing most visitors came to do (request a ride, ask for help, register a child) can be done before they scroll, with reassurance beside it. Variants: a = headline, reassurance and a photo on the left with the form as a raised card on the right; b = a tall photo carrying the headline, with the form and reassurance on a plain panel beside it; c = headline beside a photo, then the form laid out as one horizontal booking bar; a short manifesto as the opener: four to six plain declarative lines set very large, one after another, followed by a small closing paragraph and one action. Variants: a = left-aligned lines each sitting on a full-width rule; b = lines stepping in like a staircase with accented lines in the link colour and no rules; c = right-aligned lines with a vertical rule and side label, accented lines underlined with a heavy stroke
Typography
Instrument Sans carries the headlines: a plain, slightly narrow grotesque that looks organized without looking corporate. Newsreader sets the long text at 18px because planters read these pages properly, often twice, and often with a spouse. DM Mono handles labels and figures, borrowing the look of a surveyor's field book, which suits a network that literally maps neighborhoods.
Color
The ground is a pale granite gray taken from the boulders at Red Rocks, the brand color is the dark green of Front Range spruce, and the single accent is the gold of the aspens on Kenosha Pass in late September. The dark theme is a deep forest night rather than an inversion, with the green lifted to a pale sage so it still reads as the same organization.
Layout and navigation
Pages here are long and get read, so a contents column on the right tracks where you are, the way a good report does. The discovery-call button sits permanently at the foot of that column, so the one action that matters is always a glance away without shouting.
The hero
The home page opens with five plain sentences stepping down the page: fourteen churches, eleven neighborhoods, no buildings. Planters are weary of grand vision language; facts about what has actually been planted are more persuasive and more honest. The figures and the four-stage pathway follow immediately.
Calls to action
The main action is "Book a discovery call" because that is honestly the first step: forty-five minutes, no commitment. Sending churches get their own verb, "Become a sending church", and the giving link stays quiet in ghost style, because donors who arrive here have usually already been asked in person.
Photography
No stage lights and no crowds. The photographs are living rooms, long tables, a theater lobby and a rec-center hall, because those are the rooms Seedline churches meet in, and a would-be planter needs to picture a church of thirty-five rather than three thousand.
Accessibility
Body text is 18px with a 64-character measure. Every color pair passes WCAG AA in both themes, and the spruce-on-granite headline pair passes AAA. The contents column collapses on phones so nothing competes with the text, and every form field has a visible label.
Type system
- DisplayInstrument SansA plain, slightly condensed grotesque with the tidy confidence of a field survey or a well-run grant report, which is what a network asking pastors to trust it with seven years should look like.
- TextNewsreaderA text serif drawn for long reading on screens; planters read this site the way they read a commentary, slowly and more than once.
- AccentDM MonoMono for the labels, dates and figures, like the notes in a surveyor's field book.
Colour and contrast
Every text pairing is checked against WCAG 2.2 in both themes.
Light theme
| Pairing | Sample | Ratio | WCAG |
|---|
| Body text on page | Aa | 14.78:1 | AAA |
| Body text on cards | Aa | 16.34:1 | AAA |
| Secondary text | Aa | 5.94:1 | AA |
| Links | Aa | 8.46:1 | AAA |
| Button text | Aa | 9.95:1 | AAA |
| Accent label text | Aa | 7.64:1 | AAA |
| Text on dark bands | Aa | 14.78:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on dark bands | Aa | 7.78:1 | AAA |
| Text on brand bands | Aa | 9.95:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on brand bands | Aa | 6.42:1 | AA |
Dark theme
| Pairing | Sample | Ratio | WCAG |
|---|
| Body text on page | Aa | 15.18:1 | AAA |
| Body text on cards | Aa | 13.73:1 | AAA |
| Secondary text | Aa | 6.75:1 | AA |
| Links | Aa | 9.23:1 | AAA |
| Button text | Aa | 9.55:1 | AAA |
| Accent label text | Aa | 9.75:1 | AAA |
| Text on dark bands | Aa | 16.14:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on dark bands | Aa | 8.15:1 | AAA |
| Text on brand bands | Aa | 9.55:1 | AAA |
| Muted text on brand bands | Aa | 5.67:1 | AA |
