Voices of Disability — Digital Editorial

The disabled community makes up one in four Americans, which means their lives are intertwined within the spectrum of all relationships: family, friend, romantic partner, parenthood, and the public at large. And yet, the stories surrounding this identity — particularly within the lens of the pandemic — tend to position disability as a separate entity completely removed from the non-disabled. For the fourth installment of Voices of Disability, Refinery29 is focusing on the ways in which disability is intrinsic to everyday life, now more than ever, and how everyone is connected to it as part of the human experience.

A large part of the design was accessibility. As I was researching best practices and working closely with product, I learned that most of the real work is done in the backend, as most of the disabled community have accessability features already in their machine.

Given that I didn’t want to implement features that would actually cancel out any real tools one has on their computer, it was important to implement some simple interactivity to show some of the hurdles that the disabled community goes through whilst navigating the web.

To make it feel more personal, we had each of the writers included in the package to record themselves reading their article.

To make each article feel connected to the whole package, I incorporated a 3D elements against sourced imagery to tie it back to the animated logo.

Refinery29 / VICE

Art Direction
Editorial Design
Animation