Client: Knowable Role: Founder
When I joined Knowable, the company was in an unusual position: a small B2B SaaS team that had been spun out of a larger organization and acquired by RELX, suddenly expected to operate with the velocity of a startup but without any of the foundational design infrastructure. There was no design system. I built one. This article covers some of the key decisions behind it.
Knowable did have exactly one design decision nailed down before I started: two brand colors, a dark purple and a sharp yellow.
The purple was dark enough to pull double duty as a text color – just distinct enough from black to give every screen a subtle but consistent Knowable feel without shouting. The yellow was trickier to place in a B2B interface, but it found a natural home as a data color in the many charts and dashboards I designed.
From there I built out a full surface and semantic color palette to sit alongside the brand colors, with two goals in mind:
I had two goals when determining Knowable’s type ramp:
These goals are somewhat in tension. The typefaces that read as authoritative and legal often sacrifice the clarity and generous sizing that accessibility demands. After a lot of conversation with my design team, I landed on a two-font solution.
For headings, Founders Grotesk: a modern revival of early 20th century grotesque typefaces whose association with institutional print gives them an understated legal authority without leaning into fussy serifs.
For body text, Arial at 16px. Not a glamorous choice, but the right one: universally legible, familiar to older users, and reliably rendered across every environment Knowable’s users might be working in.
Attorneys spend their days reading dense, text-heavy documents. I designed Knowable’s components as a deliberate counterpoint to that: clean, airy, and generous with whitespace even when accommodating the long field labels and verbose data that legal workflows tend to produce.
