Published on 2 May 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
Updated October 2026. The screenshots and design examples below show the original 2024 website. The site has since evolved, but these examples illustrate the thinking that continues to inform its design.
When Merina Burda and I designed my website in 2024, I wanted visitors to spend their energy engaging with the ideas, with as little unnecessary effort as possible spent navigating their presentation.
We used neurodivergent experience as a design lens: what could experiences of dyslexia, autism, and ADHD reveal about barriers in the way information is presented? That question informed our choices about typography, color, content, and navigation.
The aim was a website that reflected my personality while making information easier to find and use. Different people need different things, so these choices are a starting point for learning and improvement. I welcome feedback on what works for you and what could work better.
Three key takeaways
Neurodivergent experience can help us notice unnecessary cognitive demands in everyday design. Addressing those demands can make information easier to use for a wider range of people.
We translated that thinking into practical choices: clear text on plain backgrounds, space around content, predictable navigation, and movement controlled by the visitor.
Inclusive design involves judgment, feedback, and adaptation. Merina’s design expertise and my neuro-inspired perspective helped us consider visual appeal and ease of use together.
Launching the website in 2024 gave me an opportunity to put my approach into practice. Where might the design itself make it harder for someone to engage with the content, and what could we change?
Merina Burda of Burda Consulting translated that ambition into the visual design. Her skills and experience complemented mine: I brought questions about cognitive demands and participation, and she brought expertise in turning those considerations into a coherent, attractive website. You can read Merina’s reflections about building this website here.
We consulted a range of sources, including the two shared at the end of this article. Below are the choices we made and the reasoning behind them.
Calm color palette
We selected soft, muted tones to create a calm visual setting and avoid competing for attention with the content. This choice reflected both sensory considerations and my personal style. A muted palette still needs sufficient contrast between text and background so that the words remain readable.
My branding colors shown in circles and with the color codes
The color palette is very similar to the color scheme in my family home, which was a source of inspiration for Merina. We moved to this home to provide a lower-trigger environment for our autistic son, when it became clear that central Amsterdam was nothing more for him than sensory overload. We have reflected the natural colors of the garden inside our house, since they are calming and we wanted continuity and peace, not contrast. It is intentional that the color palette of the website is natural since our experience is that this is an environment where our family can engage more productively and happily with each other.
Easy-to-read text
We chose dark text on a pale, plain background, informed by guidance on dyslexia-friendly presentation. Reading preferences vary, and there is no single color combination that suits everyone. The aim is comfortable reading with enough contrast to distinguish the words clearly.
We also avoided placing text over photographs or images, so readers would not have to separate the words from a visually busy background. We included alt text to convey the information in images to people using screen readers.
Merina selected these beautiful fonts because they are sans-serif, include space between letters, and because there is a clear distinction between similar letters.
The sans-serif fonts selected for my branding, with attention to spacing and distinguishable letter shapes.
We have aimed to ensure that the amount of text on the website does not overwhelm by organizing it in easier-to-read blocks, with clear separation between sections. We have broken up the text within each section into short paragraphs and bullets. There’s intentionally a lot of space around the content to reinforce a feeling of calm that the color palette creates.
Visual interest matters too. We used different font sizes, icons, and selected photographs to give the pages character and help readers navigate the content. The question was whether each element supported understanding or added something else to work around. That balance needs judgment and feedback; it cannot be inferred from a visitor’s diagnosis.
Explicit, clear content
I have written previously about making communication explicit: explaining what we mean, avoiding unnecessary ambiguity, and making fewer assumptions about what readers already know. Some autistic people may find implied meaning or figurative language difficult to interpret. Clearer wording can also help readers unfamiliar with the subject or reading under time pressure.
We aimed for a clean, uncluttered design so that visitors could identify the main message without competing elements pulling their attention elsewhere.
The question guiding both the writing and the layout was simple: what does the reader have to work around before they can get to the meaning?
Informative, manually controlled navigation
We chose page names that indicate what visitors will find and kept the content relevant to those titles. Predictable labels reduce the need to guess where information belongs. They also help visitors stay oriented as they move through the site.
We have eliminated automated movement within pages, ensures that information is easier to digest for those who may struggle with sensory integration.
The header bar stays put as visitors scroll down a page, so that there is a constant anchor.
Each page has been made as short as possible by only including strictly relevant content, reducing the need for scrolling.
We have not included any moving images, sliding panels, or automatically advancing carousels; all movement on my website is under your control as the visitor.
Finally, where multiple facts or steps are being communicated, we have worked hard to present these as an overview that can be digested at-a-glance.
We have used adjacent blocks instead of a list. Within the confines of a responsive website, we have done our best to ensure that the number of lines of text align across the blocks so that the visual effect is as calm and non-distracting as possible.
Icons with accompanying text, showing that the number of lines of text is aligned. It doesn’t quite work with every responsive size, but it was the best we could work out!
Neuro-inspired design as performance design
Collaborating with Merina showed us how neurodivergent experience can make unnecessary cognitive demands easier to see. Once we notice them, we can ask whether they need to be there at all. Different needs will sometimes call for different choices, so feedback and room to adapt remain part of the design.
That is the same principle I apply to team systems. The way information is shared, meetings are structured, and decisions are made affects whose knowledge becomes available to the group and how different perspectives connect. Deliberate design can help people use more of their cognitive capacity on understanding, questioning, and contributing.
For me, that is the connection between this website and my wider work: designing the conditions that help individual difference become collective capability.
If you see something that makes this website harder to use, please let me know. Your experience can help us identify what to improve.
➡️ Explore how I apply this approach to team and leadership systems on the Services page.
References
We found this article very helpful as overall guidance: ‘Web design for neurodiversity’ from the adchitects blog.
This article was especially useful for insights about color palettes and fonts: ‘Designing for Neurodivergent Audiences’, by William Careri (2022), published in Nightingale (Journal of the Data Visualization Society).
