Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui – Wellington Central Library

The brief was to design a single digital front door for Wellington's reimagined Central Library in New Zealand. The site needed to serve an unusually broad audience, every age, literacy level and accessibility need, and introduce a building most visitors had never set foot in. It had to be bicultural from the ground up, with Te reo Māori treated as a first language rather than a translation, and act as a wayfinding platform, bringing together library services, archives, makerspaces, exhibitions and council functions in one clear place. It needed to lower the threshold for visiting before anyone arrived.

This is not another council website. It is an invitation. The window to a wider world theme, drawn from the building's name, shapes every page, opening views into spaces, services and stories before anyone arrives. A te taiao (natural world) visual language of a kākano (seed) and growth carries the natural world through the interface. Te reo Māori sits alongside English as a first language, not a translation. User-controlled accessibility settings, including high contrast, low motion and low connectivity modes, let every visitor shape the experience to suit them. The site welcomes people in, rather than processing them through.

Māpuna Consultants described the result as "an innovative, culturally rich website that gives genuine effect to mana whenua and their ancestral connection to whenua (land)." In its first two weeks, the site drew 7,100 users with no paid promotion, holding them for an average of 2 minutes 25 seconds. Te Matapihi's opening weekend welcomed 21,600 visitors, issued 11,584 items, signed up 552 new members and reactivated 468 dormant ones. One early user with AuDHD wrote: "Being able to turn the animations off helps me concentrate and read the site better”. The Spinoff (media) called it "a game-changer" for the capital.

Nature as the visual language. The interface draws from te taiao (natural world), with a multi-colour palette grounded in the natural world and a kākano (seed) motif that runs through 2D and 3D elements. Parallax movement and a kākano cursor takeover carry the seed through the user's journey. The window theme of the building is reflected in flexible cut-through patterns on content blocks. Grounded in mana whenua partnership. The site was shaped in partnership with Māpuna Consultants, ensuring tikanga and cultural values were woven into every layer, design system, and experience. This was a structural commitment from the outset, not a late-stage review. Accessibility in the user's hands. A custom accessibility switcher lets every visitor adjust performance, motion and colour to suit how they read. This goes beyond compliance and treats accessibility as personal, not standardised. A karanga at the door. Visitors arrive to a karanga voiced by Māori artist Hana Buchanan, the same voice that welcomes people at the building's entrance. Visualised in 3D as a movement of kākano (seeds), the welcome anchors the digital arrival in the same tikanga as the physical one.