Clara Cristea

The institution approved the result for publication. One website had to serve both a solicitor filing a document and a school group booking a tour, and it hadn't changed in over a decade. I redesigned it for the agency Cofluence over four months in 2024, every screen built from CivicTheme and tested to WCAG 2.1 AA. The site was organised around what the institution publishes, so neither audience could see which part of it belonged to them. Colour became the signal: purple for the four working sections, gold for the three built for the public, repeating in the bar above the header, the active tab and the underline beneath each menu panel. Colour alone carries structure badly, because it vanishes for anyone who can't separate the two hues, so every one of those also carries its name in text.

• UX Designer

It went to the client as a Figma file and a working prototype, drawn from Mantine so the developers got components they already had. A network graph draws people, genes or bank accounts as points and the relationships between them as lines, and this one puts that analysis in a browser, as open source, for researchers who read data fluently and don't write code. The client had built the engine, the interface didn't exist yet, and I was the sole designer for three months. Analytics tools mostly lead with actions, which breaks the moment an analyst works with one group of people: making every influencer larger, darker and labelled meant opening four screens and stating the same criteria in each. So I moved objects above actions. A node, an edge or a group now holds its own colour, size, labels and filters, the way a shape in Figma carries its properties.

• UX Designer

The wireframes were in front of investors before the file was finished, and the company raised its first $50,000. Independent film hires on who you know, so pay rests on the word of a stranger and the job leaves no record either party can point to afterwards. Framehouse holds the fee in escrow, releases it once both people confirm the work happened, and writes a credit to both profiles at the end. I was the only designer on it, for three months, across posting, hiring, escrow, delivery, disputes and the credit that outlasts the job. Every profile carried a stone that counted jobs completed, but everyone on Framehouse is verified before they arrive, so that was measuring busyness rather than trust. I rebuilt it around secured payment — the one claim on a profile nobody can self-report.

• UX Designer