Bradford Family Album
A digital archive built to feel like discovering a stranger’s family album, one photograph at a time.
Project Details
Client: Impressions Gallery, Bradford 2025 UK
Sector: Arts & Culture
Services: Web Design, Web Development
Year: 2025
Bradford Family Album is a nationally significant digital archive project led by Impressions Gallery and New Focus, as part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. We won the brief to design and build the platform, working closely with a team of young curators to bring around 1,000 community-sourced family photographs and stories to life online.
0 +
Community-sourced photographs and stories collected for the archive
0
Young curators, aged 18 to 25 trained and directly involved in shaping the platform
0 x
Accessibility standard built in from the outset, with consideration for physical and neurodivergent access needs
A platform that had to feel like an archive, not a database
Bradford Family Album set out to bring together the district’s biggest family photo album, gathering around 1,000 community-sourced photographs and stories from across Bradford, alongside newly commissioned portraits from five rising photographers. The project was led by a team of ten young curators, New Focus: Bradford Young Curators, who worked directly with communities to collect images and shaped the design of both the digital archive and an accompanying exhibition.
The brief was specific about what the platform needed to feel like: not a static database, but something closer to the experience of leafing through a physical family album, full of texture, discovery and the freedom to wander. Images needed to lead every part of the site, viewable uncropped in their original format, with the ability to search and browse by date, location and theme, while also allowing for curated, in-depth stories that pulled together images, audio and context into something more immersive.
Designed with the curators, not just for them
We worked within the wider Bradford Family Album visual identity, building a platform with genuine visual coherence across the website, the exhibition and all associated print and publicity. The site needed to be manageable by a small team with limited capacity, so we built a straightforward back end that the New Focus curators could use directly to upload and tag content themselves, with time-saving tools built in for image handling.
The finished platform organises the archive by theme, decade and location, with audio and video woven through individual archive items and a dedicated Stories section for deeper, curated narratives. Large, high-quality images can be viewed in full but not downloaded, respecting the copyright of contributors, and the site was built mobile-first and optimised for discoverability, since much of the project’s reach would come from people finding it for the first time rather than visiting directly.
Not a static database, but something closer to the experience of leafing through a physical family album.”
Got a project you'd like to discuss? Talk to us
In need of some creative support? We’d love to know more about how we can help. We’re happy to offer a free, no-obligation consultation to talk through your project.