Designing for the Edges: Reflections from Circle Day 2024

Circle Day is Squarespace’s annual gathering of designers, developers, and digital practitioners. It’s a space where craft, tooling, and practice meet. In 2024, I was invited to speak as a Circle Partner for the Nordics, contributing to a conversation that felt less about trends and more about responsibility.

What stayed with me was not the scale of the event, but the quality of the work I witnessed among the community.

Inclusive design is not a feature

My session focused on building inclusive web experiences. Not as a checklist, not as compliance, but as a way of thinking.

Inclusive design is often framed as something you add at the end. In practice, it works best when it shapes decisions from the beginning. Structure, language, hierarchy, contrast, and navigation are not details. They are signals of who the work is for.

This is the same principle I return to across projects: clarity is not cosmetic. It is structural.

What practice teaches you

Working across sectors, from individual practitioners to large organisations, has taught me that tools are rarely the hard part. The harder work is learning to see who you are designing for, and who you might be excluding without noticing.

Three lessons continue to surface:

• Understanding people before systems

  Good digital work starts with listening. Not just to requirements, but to context, constraints, and intent.

• Designing specifically, not generically

  One-size solutions flatten meaning. Tailored structures create coherence.

• Holding accessibility and expression together

  Personal, distinctive work does not need to come at the expense of usability. The best outcomes respect both.

Why inclusive design still matters

Inclusive design is often justified through three lenses. All of them are valid, but none of them are sufficient on their own.

• The business case

  Work that reaches more people performs better over time.

• The legal frame

  Regulation matters, but compliance alone rarely produces good experiences.

• The moral argument

  Access is a baseline, not an aspiration.

What matters most is how these considerations shape decisions when trade-offs appear. That is where intent becomes visible.

Design for the extremes

One idea I return to often is that the “average user” does not exist. When you design for edge cases, you improve the experience for everyone.

This shows up in simple ways: descriptive link text instead of vague calls to action, predictable navigation instead of clever layouts, headings that communicate structure rather than decoration.

Inclusive design is not about lowering ambition. It is about increasing precision.

What I took with me

Circle Day was a reminder that thoughtful work still has a place in fast-moving digital environments. That there is space for conversations about responsibility, not just efficiency.

I left with renewed confidence in a simple belief:

when design decisions are made carefully, fewer corrections are needed later.

That applies to interfaces, systems, and organisations alike.