Our Light Unbound
A mobile-first digital catalogue for a curated art exhibition — designed so every visitor can pull up the catalogue on their phone while standing in the gallery, discovering the art and artists behind a show celebrating hope, resilience, and creative freedom.
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Overview
"Our Light Unbound" was an art exhibition running January 9–31, 2026 that explored tapping into the part of ourselves that believes peace will return — the part that inspires us to believe, hope, and dream again. I co-curated the show alongside Yaz (they/them), and together we built a strong social media presence and community integration around the exhibition over the course of a year and a half of planning.
Curation & Planning
Yaz and I began planning "Our Light Unbound" a year and a half before opening night. We used Google Drive as our shared workspace, building out a detailed month-by-month timeline with buffer room for the unexpected — travel schedules, shifting deadlines, and the realities of coordinating with a group of working artists. We divided responsibilities clearly: I led workshop scheduling, artist communication, reception logistics, and the digital catalogue; Yaz focused on merch design, social media content, and visual identity for promotional materials.
The Timeline
We mapped every phase from initial planning through closing night. Here is a condensed view of the major milestones:
Community & Social Media
Community integration was central to the exhibition from the start. We created the @our_light_unbound Instagram account early in the planning process and used it to build excitement, spotlight artists, and promote events. By opening night the account had 36 posts, 148 followers, and a reel about the exhibition that reached 2.5K views with 119 likes.
Each artist received a dedicated shoutout post featuring their work, bio, and social media handles. We promoted the full event lineup — collage workshops, paint and sip, origami, an artist talk, and the closing event — through designed flyers linking to Eventbrite pages. The account also served as the launch point for the digital catalogue, with a post featuring the QR code that visitors would later scan in the gallery.
The social media strategy extended beyond the account itself. We collaborated with the gallery (@slip_belltown · slipgallery.com), partnered businesses, and the artists' own social platforms to cross-promote. The exhibition was listed as a community event, featured in local art walk promotions, and tagged across artist networks — creating a web of visibility that brought in visitors who might not have found the show otherwise.
The Exhibition
The show opened January 9 at Slip Gallery in Belltown, Seattle. The space filled with visitors from the art community and beyond — many discovering the artists for the first time through the social media campaign we had been building for months.
The exhibition featured emerging BIPOC artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media. An interactive world map invited visitors to pin where they were from and leave a note — a small gesture that turned the gallery into a gathering place, not just a viewing space.
Workshops & Events
Throughout the month we hosted workshops — collage, paint and sip, origami mobiles, flexagon zines — and an artist talk, turning the gallery into an active creative space rather than a static display.
Click an image to see it full size with details.
The Digital Catalogue
The catalogue was designed mobile-first — because the primary use case was visitors scanning a QR code at the gallery entrance and browsing on their phones while standing in front of the art. The deep purple and gold palette evokes twilight and candlelight, creating warmth within darkness. The search bar is a critical component, designed for quick one-handed use on a phone screen. It lets visitors find specific artists or artworks without scrolling, and an accordion-style catalogue organizes works by artist with expandable sections for biographies and individual pieces — all optimized for touch interaction and small screens.
Key Navigation Elements
Gallery Hours — immediately accessible via a prominent button, because the most common question for any exhibition site is "when can I visit?"
Upcoming Events — surfaces exhibition-related events and programming beyond the static gallery experience.
Contact for Purchasing — a direct path for buyers, separated from general inquiries to reduce friction for the gallery's most valuable interaction.
Design Process
Dark Theme Strategy
The deep purple (#1a0a2e) background with gold (#d4a537) accent text was chosen to feel luxurious and gallery-like. But dark themes require deliberate contrast work: I tested every text/background combination against WCAG AA thresholds, using lighter purples and off-whites for body text to avoid the eye strain that comes from pure white on near-black. The gradient overlays on the hero section use semi-transparent layers to ensure text remains legible regardless of the background image underneath.
Information Architecture
The core design question was compactness: how do you present a full exhibition's worth of artists, bios, and artwork descriptions without overwhelming the visitor? The artist accordion collapses content by default so visitors can scan the full catalogue without endless scrolling, then expand individual artists to explore their work. Each artist section contains a biography ("About the Artist") and their exhibited pieces with descriptions — all provided by the artists themselves — functioning as both a digital catalogue and an exhibition guide that visitors can access from anywhere.
Search
The search bar filters artists and artworks in real time as visitors type, making discovery instant whether someone is looking for a specific artist or just browsing. The search is prominently placed between the exhibition statement and the catalogue, following the natural reading flow: context first, then discovery.
Accessibility
The digital catalogue removes physical barriers — crowded wall text, small print, limited space — but the dark-themed design introduced its own accessibility challenges. The goal was to ensure that the immersive, atmospheric aesthetic never came at the cost of usability.
Contrast on dark backgrounds: Gold headings on deep purple tested above 4.5:1. Body text uses lighter tones (#e0d0f0) to reduce strain while maintaining readability.
Focus visibility: Custom focus outlines using the gold accent color — highly visible on dark backgrounds, unlike browser defaults which often disappear on dark themes.
Accordion semantics: Artist sections use proper expand/collapse patterns with aria-expanded, so screen reader users know which sections are open and can navigate the catalogue efficiently.
Search accessibility: Live search results announced via aria-live region, labeled input, and keyboard-navigable results — no mouse required to find an artist.
Outcomes
The exhibition ran for the full month of January 2026. Over 1,000 visitors came through on opening night alone, and 5 art pieces were sold during the run. The digital catalogue launched before opening night and served as the primary way visitors engaged with artist bios and artwork descriptions — both in the gallery via QR code and from home.
What I Learned
Co-curating an exhibition over 18 months taught me that the organizational work — the timelines, the shared drives, the divided responsibilities — is what makes the creative work possible. Planning with Yaz showed me how much stronger outcomes get when you build in buffer time and trust your collaborator's strengths.
On the design side, building the digital catalogue reframed how I think about accessibility in physical spaces. Printed artist statements are so standard in galleries that their limitations are invisible: small text, crowded walls, inaccessible to visitors with low vision or mobility constraints. Replacing them with a searchable, resizable digital format was not just a convenience — it was a fundamentally more inclusive way to share the artists' words. The dark theme added its own accessibility challenges, but the constraints forced better design decisions: the gold-on-purple palette that gives the site its gallery feel is also what makes focus indicators pop and headings scannable.
Working directly with the artists — receiving their bios and descriptions in their own words — also deepened my respect for collaborative content creation. The catalogue is better because the artists shaped it, not just me.