Experience design · Website, app, wayfinding · 2025

Illusions of Light

A ticketing site, a companion app and wayfinding signs for an immersive light exhibit, designed as one system.

How do you make an exhibit feel like one experience, online and in the room?

Role: Concept, information architecture, UI, visual design
Timeline: Sept–Dec 2025
Team: Solo, with peer critique
Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Adobe Firefly

try it yourself

Illusions of Light title over a rainbow arc, prism pillars and a mountain mural

in short

I designed the full visitor experience for a fictional light exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center. It has three parts: a website to explore and buy tickets, a mobile app where visitors draw with light and earn rewards, and the signs that guide them through the building. I worked from moodboards to a sitemap, sketches, annotated wireframes and clickable Figma prototypes, keeping one visual language across screens and signs.

Choosing a direction

My first pitch was a dark, mysterious exhibit about the unexplained, from glowing deep-sea creatures to writing nobody has translated. I moved to light: an exhibit that would help visitors see light as both a scientific phenomenon and an artistic medium.

Prism Dreams moodboard: prisms, rainbow refractions and chrome — Fig. 1Two directions. I named the risk of each: Prism Dreams might overload and feel trendy, and Reflections & Glow might feel too subdued.

Reflections and Glow moodboard: moonlit water, fireflies and aurora — Fig. 1Two directions. I named the risk of each: Prism Dreams might overload and feel trendy, and Reflections & Glow might feel too subdued.

I went with the bold, prismatic direction.

“Visitors should feel transported into a dreamlike environment where light itself becomes art.”

I generated base images in Adobe Firefly, then edited the lighting and color and set all the type myself in Photoshop.

Structure before screens

The sitemap splits the app into three color-coded flows: the light game, sharing your creation, and an exhibit map with hidden rooms. Each flow ends back at Home, and a five-tab bottom bar is always there.

Color-coded sitemap with three app workflows — Fig. 2The sitemap, and one of three hand-drawn workflow sketches.

Hand-drawn workflow sketch of the light game on phone screens, with arrows and notes — Fig. 2The sitemap, and one of three hand-drawn workflow sketches.

For the website, I sketched the home, exhibit and ticketing pages, then annotated the key decisions in the wireframes: a fixed nav so people can always get around, a prominent “Get Tickets” button because tickets are the main goal, and a date picker with a simple +/− quantity selector.

Hand-drawn wireframes of the home, exhibit and ticketing pages — Fig. 3Website sketches: home, exhibit page and ticketing.

Annotated low-fidelity home page wireframe with notes on navigation and the ticket call to action — Fig. 4The annotated home page wireframe. “CTA drives users directly to the ticket purchase page (primary conversion goal).”

A website that gets out of the way

Website home page with the exhibit hero and a Get Tickets button — Fig. 5Home and ticketing. The brief placed the exhibit inside the Cincinnati Museum Center’s site, so the header and footer follow theirs.

Ticketing page with a date picker and quantity selector — Fig. 5Home and ticketing. The brief placed the exhibit inside the Cincinnati Museum Center’s site, so the header and footer follow theirs.

The Get Tickets button sits in the middle of the hero. Ticketing fits on a single page: pick a date, choose a quantity, check out. Inside the museum’s white site template, the art carries the color.

An app that rewards making things

Inside the exhibit, visitors use their phone like a flashlight to draw on a wall, then save and share what they made to earn points toward rewards. Home offers two clear starting points, Start Game or Explore the Exhibit, so nobody has to figure out where to begin.

Four app screens: Draw With Light, Your Light Creation, Rewards and Prizes, and You Unlocked a Reward — Fig. 6The core loop: draw with your phone’s light, see what you made, redeem points.

High-fidelity share flow with annotations under each screen — Fig. 7The share flow: home → creations → name your art → share → caption → success, with notes on every screen.

One small decision I like: before sharing, visitors name their creation. As I wrote in the annotations, it “encourages emotional connection to their work and gives context for social posts.” The success screen then shows the points earned and a “Create Again” button to keep the loop going.

The same language on the walls

The exhibit map in the app and the entrance sign use the same four rooms: Color Room, Reflection Zone, Prism Tunnel and Spectrum Hall. Early critique pushed me toward a more futuristic typeface in white, which I carried from the hero image to the signs.

Four app screens: the exhibit map with four rooms, Prism Tunnel, Full Spectrum Unlocked, and a Prism Explorer badge — Fig. 8The map flow in the app.

Lit entrance sign listing the four rooms

Elevator directory sign by floor — Fig. 9Four of the seven wayfinding mockups.

Sidewalk A-frame sign reading Step Into the Light — Fig. 9Four of the seven wayfinding mockups.

Looking back

This was a clickable Figma prototype, not a built product. The flashlight drawing and the LED rooms are concepts, and I didn’t test them with real visitors. Some interface components came from the Figma Community, and the base images from Adobe Firefly.

“I wanted to create something visually strong, organized, and easy to follow.”