Washington State Department of Commerce

WA Commerce touches almost every part of community and economic development in the state (housing, infrastructure, business services, crime victims' support), and the old site had years of inconsistent structure to show for it. The brief was to unify a huge amount of content into a manageable, scalable design system, without compromising on accessibility or the site's growing multilingual audience.

Design for accessibility, by default

As a public platform used by people looking for housing support or navigating unemployment, accessibility wasn't a checkbox here - it shaped the design from the first concept. Clean, intuitive navigation and clear content hierarchy were the priority throughout, built to hold up under full WCAG review and everyday use with a keyboard or screen reader.

Designing for eleven languages, both directions

The site needed to work in eleven languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic. That's a real design constraint, not a translation afterthought - layouts, navigation and type had to hold together whichever direction the content reads.