Case Study Creative Catalyst Fellowship

Custom WordPress Development | USAID & GLX Collaboration

The Creative Catalyst Fellowship (CCF) is a powerful initiative launched in collaboration with GLX and USAID. At its heart, the program supports a fellowship of creatives—writers, designers, filmmakers, and strategists—who use storytelling as a tool for social change in Sri Lanka. What started as an offline movement quickly gained momentum, calling for a digital platform that could reflect the spirit of the program and grow alongside it.

This wasn’t just about building a website—it was about creating a digital home for an evolving community of change-makers. The platform needed to serve as both a storytelling space and an interactive archive of impact, while also adhering to rigorous design and accessibility standards set by USAID.

That’s where we came in.

From Brief to Blueprint: Understanding What CCF Needed

We began by diving deep into the mission of CCF. This wasn’t a traditional corporate website. It was meant to inspire, inform, and include—from potential fellows to global funders. Yet the initial structure offered to the team didn’t support these goals. Navigation was unintuitive, design lacked cohesion, and most importantly, the site didn’t accommodate a seamless user experience, especially for users with disabilities or those accessing the site in Sinhala or Tamil.

We approached this with empathy and focus. Our first step was a development sprint, where we mapped out the platform’s functional needs and content strategy, aligning them with the creative vision of the fellowship. The ask was clear: a visually compelling, standards-compliant platform that made it easy to explore stories, meet fellows, and understand the program’s wider impact.

Designing for Accessibility and Storytelling

Accessibility was not an afterthought—it was core to the build. We designed the platform to be fully WCAG-compliant from the ground up, ensuring that it met USAID’s technical standards while remaining beautiful and intuitive for everyday users.

Our in-house designers worked alongside a creative visual team to develop a custom UI/UX design system, tailored specifically for this project. Clean layouts, strong typographic hierarchy, and subtle animations were all built to enhance rather than distract. To showcase key program milestones and outputs, we embedded data visualization elements that gave context to the numbers—turning stats into stories.

The build itself was powered by WordPress, chosen for its balance between editorial control and long-term scalability. Using Tailwind CSS, we crafted a lightweight, responsive front end that performs seamlessly across all devices and screen sizes. The site supports trilingual content (Sinhala, Tamil, and English), making it accessible to a broad local and international audience.

More Than a Website: A Living Archive of Change

What we delivered was more than a digital presence—it was a living archive of the program’s energy, creativity, and outcomes. Fellows can be featured and celebrated. Projects can be showcased and tracked. Partners and the public can explore the impact through curated stories and visual data.

Behind the scenes, the content team at CCF now has full control over updates, from publishing fellow profiles to updating event recaps. The modular CMS makes the platform future-proof, allowing them to scale the site’s content without reengineering the experience.

The Outcome

The new CCF website now functions as an open window into the fellowship’s mission. With every page and post, it reinforces the values of transparency, inclusion, and creativity. It’s responsive, accessible, trilingual—and ready to grow.

This project reminded us of why we do what we do: to build digital spaces that amplify good work. We’re proud to have partnered with GLX, USAID, and the CCF team to bring this platform to life.

If you’re looking to create a user-friendly CMS platform that tells your story with clarity, elegance, and impact, let’s chat.