Textile Hive Digital Exhibition System: To bring Textile Hive’s private archive of over 40,000 textiles to a broader audience, I designed a scalable modular system for digital exhibitions. The project launched with two initial exhibitions, setting the foundation for an ongoing series of visually engaging and accessible online experiences.
Role: UX/UI Designer responsible for:
1—Designing the modular component library
2—Wireframing and prototyping user flows
3—Interaction and visual design
4—Collaborating with developer to ensure seamless design-to-launch transitions
Team: Creative Director, Project Manager, Developer, UX / UI Designer
Context: Textile Hive is a private textile archive serving as a resource for fashion designers, researchers, and creatives. This project aimed to make the archive’s materials publicly accessible through richly interactive digital exhibitions.
Challenge: To design a system capable of:
1—Supporting ongoing creation of digital exhibitions while ensuring uniqueness and consistency.
2—Seamlessly integrating digital exhibitions with physical ones
3—Meeting accessibility standards and prioritizing mobile-first design.
We expanded on the two initial exhibitions to develop a library of reusable components, creating a scalable system for future exhibitions. While a visually layered approach was a part of the design brief—incorporating overlapping elements, depth effects, and intricate visual hierarchies to enrich the user experience—the components were designed to degrade gracefully, ensuring the site remained accessible for all users, regardless of their device or browser capabilities.
Further wireframing and prototyping provided opportunities to explore and test alternative navigation systems, ensuring they supported user needs. This process also helped refine how the visual design could unify the components into a seamless and cohesive flow. Prototypes were instrumental in maintaining the sense of layering, hierarchy, and timing while avoiding an overly cluttered or visually overwhelming experience.
I built the full system in Figma, collaborating closely with the developer to ensure a smooth and efficient transition from design to implementation.
Client Feedback: While the dynamic system is still under development, the response to the initial exhibitions has been extremely positive. Textile Hive has expressed satisfaction with the visually polished exhibitions, which set a strong foundation for their new exhibit program.
Learnings:
1—Prioritize features at the start of the project. While the must haves were all clear for our early launch alongside the physical exhibits, an amorphous list of requests for the larger design system made the latter half of the project less efficient.
2—Keep it simple. Complex UI animations and unique galleries made it more difficult to ensure that all of the components of the modular system worked together. By simplifying and including divider sections to link additional features to the main exhibition flows we were able to build complex exhibitions from simple parts.
Future Steps:
1—Conduct a comprehensive QA process with developers to ensure the system’s full functionality and readiness for launch.
2—Respond to any needs as Textile Hive begins to use the system to create exhibitions independently.