Recognition:

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

Daniel's Music Foundation (DMF) has been empowering people with disabilities through music for over two decades in NYC. When they expanded to remote programming during Covid-19, their potential audience went from local to global, but their website couldn't keep up. They needed a full rebuild serving two very different audiences: students with a wide range of disabilities, and high-net-worth donors and partners of all abilities.

As Group Creative Director, I directed the creative across design, animation, development, and UX from the very start, and partnered with strategy on the creative brief, translating stakeholder interviews into three themes for the team to build from: joy, impact, and accessibility. Instead of treating accessibility requirements as a checklist, I approached it as a creative opportunity — building an experience where everyone can participate equally without compromising joy or impact.

Impact: Webby Awards People's Voice Winner, 2024, Accessible Technology category (verified). Anthem Awards Silver, 2024, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (verified). Since launch, DMF reported the redesign immediately elevated brand perception among potential donors and drove a record-high number of inquiries for instructor positions.

Role: Creative Direction, UX, Design Direction, Brief Development

All accessible experiences are not created equal.

A quick note—accessibility is often stigmatized as a trade-off for beautiful, award-worthy design. Often times designers lean on tools that modify the primary experience entirely, or eliminate “fun” features for certain audiences in order to create an experience that meets their idea of “high design” despite it being a lesser experience for many people with accessibility needs. This can be seen in the physical world as much as the digital one. Just look at any ADA building entrance that has a lesser-than experience to the main one. 

We adapted DMF’s brand for online expression and translated the heart of their in-person experience into a digital home.

Alive with color – and contrast.

We developed and tested an extensive color pallet at the beginning of the project that would give us a wide range of color combinations to work with. It came in handy to create variety across high volume content like these event overview cards for DMF’s packed calendar.

Clarity and connection through voice and tone.

We helped DMF nurture a sense of belonging by crafting a warm, conversational voice with clear language. We treated alt text (text that screen readers read aloud to describe images) as a core part of our copy and thoughtfully chose our CTA language – like using “Play video” instead of “Watch video” to normalize all ways of enjoying an experience.

All of the experience touch points were designed to be inclusive and encourage discovery.

From the beginning, our design system accounted for accessibility in every UI element. We favored a larger scale to better serve users with visual and mobility impairments, included copy for UI elements like “Close” buttons to make actions more explicit, and leveraged subtle motion for special details like hover states to add liveliness without hindering interactions.

Showcasing impact with interactions.

We designed colorful, flippable cards with stats about the powerful results of DMF’s programs, leveraging our UI system to make the action explicitly clear. Each card includes a “Flip card” CTA to communicate how to reveal not only more in-depth descriptions of each statistic, but also DMF’s ambitious goals for the upcoming year.

Letting DMF’s thoughts shine, one tidbit at a time.

We embraced carousels to share robust information like community testimonials and DMF’s big-picture dreams. And to ensure they were screen reader accessible, we set clear expectations for the amount of content by indicating the number of slides in our UI. We also designed the cards to bleed off the screen to emphasize there was more to explore.

Our work has been celebrated and recognized by the foundation as well as the Webby’s and Anthem Awards for its impact.

I had the honor of accepting an award on our behalf and took advantage of the opportunity to speak about the importance of accessibility and belonging in the digital world and beyond.