I made accessibility and joy one brief.

Nothing could be inaccessible. Nothing could be less than great design. That decided the palette, the UI scale, the copy inside every interactive element and the way the whole thing moved. Then we designed some fun into it.

The problem

DMF had spent two decades empowering people with disabilities through music in New York. When Covid pushed them into remote programming, their audience went from local to global overnight and their website could not carry it. The rebuild had to serve two audiences with almost nothing in common: students with a wide range of disabilities, and high-net-worth donors and partners.

What I did

Fixed the brand before the site. They came for a website. We stepped back and made the case that the brand underneath it could not carry a global audience, so we rebuilt the logo, the color palette and the typefaces first. Everything after that had something to be built on.

Set the brief with strategy, not a checklist. I partnered with strategy on the creative brief and turned stakeholder interviews into three themes the whole team built from: joy, impact and accessibility. Then directed every discipline against it from the very start, design, art direction, copy, animation, development and UX.

Put the conviction in the details. A palette tested for contrast and range. Larger-scale UI for visual and mobility impairments. Alt text treated as core copy. "Play video" instead of "Watch video," to normalize every way of experiencing content. Hover states tuned for liveliness without triggering repetitive behaviors. And Daily Smiles, an interactive that rolls on, shares an inclusion quote from co-founder Daniel Trush's own music, and rolls away.

Impact

People’s Voice Winner: The Webby Awards 2024 - Websites and Mobile Sites Accessible Technology Category

Silver: Anthem Awards 2024 - Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Partnership or Collaboration for a Product, Innovation, or Service

DMF reported the redesign immediately lifted brand perception among potential donors and drove a record-high number of instructor inquiries

All accessible experiences are not created equal.

Accessibility gets treated as a trade-off against beautiful, award-worthy design. Designers lean on tools that modify the primary experience, or strip the fun out of it for certain audiences, and call the result high design. Look at any ADA entrance that is visibly lesser than the main one. It happens in the physical world as much as the digital one.

DMF's in-person programs work because of how they feel. So we rebuilt the logo, the palette, the typefaces and the voice before we touched the site.

Alive with color – and contrast.

The palette was developed and tested at the beginning of the project so it would give us a wide range of combinations to work with, all of them legible. It came in handy immediately, for high-volume content like these event overview cards.

We wrote it the way DMF talks.

Warm, conversational, clear. Alt text written as core copy rather than filled in afterwards. "Play video" instead of "Watch video," so the CTA normalizes every way of enjoying an experience.

The whole system in motion. Including a rainfall of smilies.

The design system accounted for accessibility in every UI element: larger scale for users with visual and mobility impairments, explicit copy inside interactive elements so a Close button says close, and subtle motion that adds liveliness without hindering interaction.

Impact numbers nobody reads, made worth flipping over.

Flippable cards carrying stats about the results of DMF's programs, using the UI system to make the action explicit with a Flip card CTA that says what happens next. Short front, fuller description behind.

Long copy condensed into carousels, so it never overwhelms.

The number of slides is shown in the UI, and the cards bleed off the edge of the screen so there is always visibly more to explore.