Accessibility-led redesign
This project reimagines The Centre Cannot Hold, a Postmarginal digital portal, while protecting the original site's immersive tone, theatrical pacing, artist focus, and green-yellow visual atmosphere.
Client
The client for this redesign is The Centre Cannot Hold, a Postmarginal digital portal featuring artists, creative works, profiles, stories, themes, and resources. The site invites visitors into a community of artists creating between and beyond margins.
Peter Farbridge, director of The Centre Cannot Hold, framed the project around access, longevity, and care for the existing artistic experience. His feedback helped the redesign balance immersive storytelling with clearer navigation and WCAG-oriented improvements.
Short Summary
"The redesign keeps The Centre Cannot Hold immersive, while making the path through its artists, stories, and resources clearer for everyone."
This project redesigns The Centre Cannot Hold, a Postmarginal digital portal where visitors meet artists, creative works, stories, themes, profiles, and resources. The work draws on accessibility conversations, mood boards, low fidelity layouts, component experiments, and two rounds of user feedback. Testing focused on the homepage, profiles, explore, resources, and about pages, revealing opportunities to improve navigation, content clarity, typography, hierarchy, and user control. The final direction keeps the original site's immersive spirit while adding plain language, predictable wayfinding, readable layouts, and reusable components. The result is welcoming, organized, accessible, and easier to navigate for diverse audiences across artistic communities.
Visual process
These three moodboards shaped the redesign's atmosphere: tinted glass collage, immersive green backgrounds, and accessibility-first interface references.
Extracted from TCCH UX Accessibility notes
The accessibility meeting framed the redesign as a balance: keep the original site's artistic, relational, non-linear feeling while making the experience clearer for disabled, neurodivergent, deaf, blind, low-vision, and keyboard-only visitors.
The live site was valued for its parallax, descent-based journey, immersive mood, and refusal of a rigid information hierarchy. The redesign goal was not to flatten the artwork into a conventional site, but to make the experience easier to enter.
Key elements identified clearer image descriptions, video and audio descriptions, captions, visible accessibility controls, stronger text hierarchy, and better keyboard support as necessary improvements.
The team discussed sound, movement, scrolling, and psychophysical design as meaningful parts of the site. Any sound or motion needed controls, captions, and a clear purpose.
The tagging system should describe themes and creative concerns rather than reduce artists to social identifiers. Artists choose tags that reflect what fascinates them in their work.
Process documentation
The process explored a puzzle-like frosted glass collage, a thematic background-led approach, and an accessibility-focused direction inspired by The Centre Cannot Hold.
Design guidance emphasized a black base, strong imagery, floating elements, curated homepage content, meaningful interactivity, and less rigid site flow.
Early IA changes reduced resource tags, separated themes from disciplines, and used progressive disclosure so visitors were not confronted with too many concepts at once.
The Figma system moved toward one reusable navigation component with states for default, About hover, Resources hover, Contact hover, and Explore hover.
Artist and accessibility interviews
Interview notes with Vytautas emphasized that blind users often navigate with screen readers, keyboard commands, and arrow keys. Long sequential pages can make specific artists or information difficult to find.
Prototyping notes stressed that every button needs a clear label for screen readers, elements should be grouped in a logical reading order, and reusable components make accessibility tags easier for developers to apply consistently.
Extracted from first and second user testing
User testing confirmed that the redesign improved clarity, navigation, and structure, while still needing more polish in hierarchy, back buttons, theme controls, and page-level cues.
The headline describing a "digital portal" gave visitors immediate context. Poetic cues such as "Enter, descend, explore" worked when paired with plain language. Large poem blocks in the middle of the page risked hiding content below.
The page became clearer when it moved from high-level framing to biography and then specific works. "Artist Projects" helped explain the Living Archive section. The back button should return visitors to the welcome page.
Category filtering and "See more themes" worked well for progressive disclosure. The prototype still needed a collapse control, clearer media-player context, and accurate filtering instead of randomized performance categories.
Dropdown navigation improved when Creative, Organizational, and Advocacy options immediately revealed relevant content. Testing also called for higher-contrast close controls, clearer instructions, and a useful "Back to top" button.
The quote should come after explanatory text rather than before it. Plain language mattered here because testers were still asking what the project was about and who the site was for.
Add back buttons across pages, move the home button into the nav, add theme collapse, increase close-button contrast, rebalance resource instructions, and test with actual blind or low-vision users.
Final prototype
One of the final prototypes is available in Figma. It shows the redesign direction, interaction thinking, and page-level structure for The Centre Cannot Hold.
Open the Figma file to view the prototype frame, interaction states, and design decisions beyond this public-facing summary page.
Design outcome
The outcome keeps The Centre Cannot Hold's descent-like, artwork-forward personality, but clarifies the entry points a public audience needs: what the project is, who the artists are, how themes connect, and where resources live.
The homepage introduces the site as a digital portal for performances, films, creative works, profiles, stories, and resources before asking visitors to explore.
Frosted glass controls, dark atmospheric backgrounds, green and yellow gradients, and stable navigation support the original mood without obscuring content.
The notes and user tests are now summarized directly on the page, while the visual design deck remains available as supporting prototype documentation.
The redesign deck remains embedded as visual documentation of the prototype and presentation work.
