It’s an exciting time for us at Outlandish as we build out our design team, growing on our digital foundations to put Accessible Digital Design at the heart of our work, alongside our passion for data, campaigns and projects that do-good.
Last year, we published our Blog giving guidance about accessible design, and 2024 has been a year of design changes for both our clients and us, here at Outlandish / Space 4.
Below are just a few tweaks to be looking out for on some of our websites and the rationale behind our thinking.
Outlandish
We believed in leading by example so we asked our Designers to amplify our own digital properties. We wanted to ensure that our website was as inclusive as possible to ensure that it aligned with our core values. We made some subtle but important changes. We broke up our blocks, ensuring our text was aligned* and added some accessible icons to our key pages.
“I’m really passionate about accessible design, and have been working with Outlandish for the past year, predominantly refreshing existing client’s websites to work for people with disabilities and/or are neurodivergent, and providing a better user experience for everyone.” Fran Cook – Designer
Do take a look around and tell us what you think!
UKERC
UKERC had some funds to make a few changes and add some new requirements to their website. Within a limited budget, our dynamic design team were able to ‘lift’ the designs and again, ensure that the site was accessible. We added subtle washes to different pages, improved the tile view and worked with the Digital Comms Team at UKERC to ensure that the changes didn’t jar with approved brand.
School Cuts
For the 2024 election, Outlandish worked in collaboration with the NEU and Small Axe. We ensured that all the data required to amplify the message to Stop School Cuts was ready for the campaign trail. This helped to ensure that the issue was front of mind for all candidates.
We have since carried out User Research to understand how to iterate the campaign site in order to keep people involved, outside of intense campaign periods. The School Cuts campaign has a very specific brand and Outlandish continued to work with Small Axe to meet the Digital Design challenge of Interactive Usability vs Brand integrety.
Below are the proposed new designs with a dash of additional colour, watch this space in January for the release to live.
Looking into 2025 and beyond?
We are excited to share more design work, please do to browse our Design capabilities and If you are interested in an Accessibility Review, Brand uppdate, or site refresh then please get in touch at hello@outlandish.com
*References: https://www.boia.org/blog/why-justified-or-centered-text-is-bad-for-accessibility