NAC@50+

The brief

A building with fifty years of stories to tell

The National Arts Centre has stood at the centre of Canadian cultural life since 1969. To mark its 50th anniversary, the goal was to create an experience that would bring the NAC building and it's archives to all of Canada.

The brief set up two very different audiences with two very different needs: someone who had never set foot in the NAC should feel genuinely transported into the space, while someone who knew the building intimately should encounter something they'd never seen before. Designing for both simultaneously became one of the central creative and technical challenges of the project.

Those who had never been inside should feel like they're in the space. Frequent visitors should see something they've never seen before.

The question we were trying to answer

How do you stay immersed while staying informed?

Early in the project it became clear that the UI would make or break the experience. The experience combined free exploration with guided narrative sections, with discoverable objects scattered throughout the spaces: objects and moments embedded throughout the space that users could find, examine, and learn from.

The interface needed a basic map, a room list, and an artifact inventory. The primary audience is not expected to be experienced in gaming, so it was important that the UI be simple and familiar; more reminiscent of a website than a game.

UI design

How it took shape

Wireframes — the main menu

The first wireframing phase focused entirely on the main menu: the panel that would hold the artifact list, the map, and the room navigation. The core tension was density versus presence; the menu needed to hold a meaningful amount of information, but had to occupy as little screen space as possible to preserve the sense of being inside the building.

A key insight during this phase was that the menu's contents weren't equally useful at all times. During guided sections, where the camera follows a preset path, users have no rooms to search, meaning the map is useful but the artifact list is not. This led to a modular panel design where sections could be independently shown or hidden, rather than presenting everything at once.

I also worked through how artifact discovery should be communicated. Clicking a discovered artifact in the list needed to surface more information, such as a close-up of the 3D model, image, or video, without navigating away from the environment entirely.

First iteration — applying the brand

With the wireframe structure established, the first mockup pass introduced the NAC's brand colours and began working through the visual language of discovered versus undiscovered artifacts. The distinction needed to be immediately legible, without relying solely on colour, to remain accessible.

Final mockups — simplify and focus

Feedback on the first iteration pointed toward the same issue from multiple directions: there was too much competing for attention. The final mockup pass made a series of focused reductions. The palette was simplified, with the brand purple pulled back to accent use only. The menu was widened to accommodate longer text chunks more comfortably. The fullscreen map was cut entirely in favour of a minimap only, as it was found that a larger map was not needed or desired. Non-narrative controls, home and settings, were moved to a quiet top-left position, clearly separated from the experience-facing interface.

Unreal Engine development

Building the experience

Alongside the UI work, I was deeply involved in the Unreal Engine implementation, which meant the design decisions I made in Figma were ones I also had to execute in engine. That dual role shaped both disciplines: it kept the UI grounded in what was technically achievable in real time, and it meant implementation decisions were informed by the user experience intent from the start rather than being handed off across a gap.

Development work included implementing the user interface in Unreal's UMG system, building out the interactive features that drive artifact discovery and narrative progression, and contributing to the construction of the immersive environments users move through. The guided camera path system, which needed to feel cinematic while still honouring the user's ability to freely rotate and look around, was a particular area of focus, requiring careful tuning to feel navigable without feeling mechanical.