04 / 2023
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Apr - Aug 2023
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Web Design · Digital Gallery
Mom, I See War
A digital museum documenting children’s experiences of war through their own artwork. An archive of more than 15,000 pieces held in a single, considered online experience.
How do you hold 15,000 pieces of children’s art in a single experience, at scale.
The brief: design a gallery that lets visitors sit with one piece at a time, while never losing sight of the weight and scale of what’s being shown.
Mom, I See War is a digital museum that archives real experiences of war through the artwork of children who’ve lived through it. The platform combines immersive digital galleries with AR and VR exhibitions to bring those perspectives to a global audience.
My brief was to design a virtual gallery experience that could house the full archive in a way that felt considered and intimate rather than overwhelming. It was my first project working at this kind of scale and with this kind of subject matter, and it reshaped how I think about immersive web experiences.
01
Audience & priorities
Mapped four primary audience groups (from first-time visitors to educators to journalists), and ran a MoSCoW session with the client to lock down priorities. The clearest tension that came out of it: the archive needed to feel discoverable and curated. Both, not either.
02
Structuring the journey
Built the sitemap and a first round of low-fidelity frames focused on how a visitor moves from the scale of the archive down to a single piece of art. Prototyping early gave us space to test whether the journey held up before we touched visual design.
03
Bringing it to life
Once the brand team delivered the visual language, we took the frames through to high fidelity and a second round of prototyping. I then worked closely with the developers in handover calls so the intent (particularly around the gallery interactions) carried through to build.
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© Harry Thorpe · 2026
London, UK