Haas Education Law

I started with brand, not layout. The direction was warm and parent centered rather than courtroom centered. Deep teal and warm gold, Raleway in bold and light. The voice guide had a side by side of how the firm should sound and how it should not, which became the reference point every time the copy started drifting toward 'pursuant to IDEA.' She approved it in one round.

I kept the gavel and book in the logo because the metaphor is actually right for education law. The execution was the problem, not the concept. I rebuilt the mark from scratch in Illustrator so it reads as a real identity instead of an icon pulled off a shelf.

Then I wrote the copy. Every line was written for the parent, not the bar association. No 'passionate advocates.' No 'fighting for justice.' The headline on the homepage is 'If you're worried about your child's special education rights, you're already doing the work,' because that is what that parent needs to hear before anything else. The services page is organized by where the family is in the process, not by practice area. The FAQ answers the questions that come up on almost every intake call, including the one nobody wants to ask out loud, which is what this costs.

I designed the homepage first and treated it as the visual system for everything else. The remaining pages were built from that system rather than designed as six more separate PDFs.

Two practical calls kept the project moving. Team headshots were flagged as a risk on day one, so I designed with placeholders and swapped real photos in as the last step, which meant the launch date never depended on four busy people booking a photographer. And rather than wait on hosting credentials, I built the entire site on my own staging server and migrated it with Duplicator once Courtney gave the green light.