Work/TheWarrenCaseStudy

THE PROBLEM

PSYCHOLOGICAL WEIGHT

THE BRIEF

EXPERIMENTAL WEBSITE

THE SOLUTION

INFINITE HALLWAY

INTENDED AUDIENCE

DIGITAL ART ENTHUSIASTS

THE PROBLEM

Life is filled with expectations, from society, family, friends, works and even one's self. These expectations create a psychological weight that can feel endless, suffocating, and inescapable.

The challenge: How can a website go beyond simply describing these pressures, and instead make the users feel these emotions of dread, exhaustion, and entrapment in an immersive way?

THE BRIEF

The brief was to design an experimental website that communicates the overwhelming and cyclical nature of expectations through immersive interaction and symbolism.

Deliverables included: A responsive website prototype designed as an endless hallway. An accompanying motion-based walkthrough video that guides the viewer through the concept. A series of custom illustrations and visual assets symbolising dread, pressure, exhaustion, and entrapment.

THE SOLUTION

To embody the psychological burden of expectations, the website was structured as an infinite hallway. Looping, disorienting, and filled with symbolic elements.

Eyes & Shadows → constant surveillance, social pressure. Clocks, Crows, Looming Figures → inevitability, dread, the passage of time. Withered Flowers → exhaustion, emotional depletion. Endless Galaxy Textures → vastness and loneliness, impossibility of escape. Cobwebs & Spiked Surfaces → entrapment, the inability to move freely. Generated Poems & Text Walls → overwhelming, suffocating language of expectations.

By weaving these motifs into a looping, interactive environment, The Warren transforms abstract concepts into a visceral sensory experience, making the user feel what expectations do, rather than just reading about them.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This project was created for an audience interested in experimental digital art and interactive design, particularly those exploring how web environments can express psychological states.

It also speaks to design educators and peers as a demonstration of how interaction design can embody intangible human experiences.

CONCEPT & NARRATIVE

The Warren visualises what it feels like to live inside expectation, a maze you can't escape, only explore. Each hallway and door embodies a different emotional state, dread, endlessness, pressure, exhaustion, and entrapment, turning psychological tension into architecture.

The site rejects conventional navigation for looping, disorienting movement, making the user feel the weight of repetition and uncertainty. Hand-drawn stippling, eyes, and door motifs build an atmosphere of surveillance and confinement, while the act of scrolling becomes a metaphor for persistence, motion without real progress. It's not a website about control, but about surrender, a quiet descent into the architecture of your own mind.

"The Warren is not meant to be escaped. It's a visual loop that mirrors how expectations trap, pressure, and shape us, an endless architecture of the mind."

"The Warren" the Name:

The name The Warren emerged from exploring synonyms of "hallway", the central motif of the project. A Warren refers literally to a network of interconnecting rabbit burrows, but figuratively it describes a confusing, maze-like structure of tight, winding passages.

This dual meaning captures the essence of the concept, a space that is both constructed and confining, where navigation feels cyclical, disorienting, and psychologically claustrophobic.

Choosing The Warren as the title allowed the project to move beyond the ordinary "hallway" and instead communicate a more complex metaphor: a mental labyrinth shaped by social and self-imposed expectations, intricate, endless, and impossible to fully escape.

"The Warren" Logo:

Built from a network of corridor lines, the wordmark forms both the project title and its navigation system.

It's a maze made of expectation, users move through its typography like rooms and passageways, blurring the line between branding and experience.

"The Door" Logo:

The door logo acts as the entry point into The Warren, a symbolic threshold.

The eye at its top suggests constant observation, while the mirrored vines hint at endless paths and repetition.

Its symmetry feels controlled and uneasy, mirroring the pressure of being watched and judged.

Typography:

Color Palette:

#000000

#FFFFFF

Home Screen

The home screen serves as the main corridor of the warren, a continuous, side-scrolling hallway that stretches endlessly across the screen. Each door along the passage represents one of the five experiments: dread, endless, pressure, exhausted and ensnared.

As users scroll horizontally, they move through an unbroken cycle of doors, each one inviting entry into its own world, a separate hallway embodying a specific emotional state. Opening a door doesn't break the flow; instead, it pulls the user deeper into a maze of hallways, mirroring how expectations often lead from one pressure to another.

The design uses perspective, yet every path feels the same, an endless loop of expectation and entrapment.

Navigation Screen

The navigation for this site is not a standard menu, it is the Warren.

The main logo is built as an interconnected set of corridors and hallways, referencing the psychological “burrow” and loops of expectation. As you scroll, the logo becomes the map: a parallax blueprint-like layout that behaves like a miniature maze.

Small dots on the map represent “doors.” Each dot animates slightly on hover, and each one opens into a different section, illustrated with tiny symbolic icons that hint at the content inside. Instead of going from top-to-bottom like a normal case study, you explore laterally and non-linearly, like walking through hidden tunnels.

The user doesn’t click through pages, they discover them.

DREAD

Users encounter looming symbols, eyes, shadows, and figures that follow them. Movement feels slow and watched, building tension through repetition.

01 Concept

Concept:

The experiment Dread explores the psychological weight of expectations through the sensation of being watched, followed, and loomed over.

In the context of the website, dread represents the anticipatory anxiety that builds when one feels constantly observed or evaluated, a feeling that mirrors the social pressures at the heart of The Warren's theme.

02 Hallway

Hallway:

The hallway embodies the passage of time and the inevitability of pressure. Clocks, crow motifs, and long looming shadows populate the walls, symbolising the unrelenting nature of expectations. Each tick and movement reinforces the tension of waiting for something inevitable.

03 Corridor

Corridor:

As the user scrolls, shadowy figures stretch across the walls, floor and ceiling, their limbs and tails indistinct and inescapable. These forms shift subtly with motion, creating a sense that they are reaching out. The feeling of dread made visual.

04 Door

Door:

The door for this experiment integrates a clock face and a shadow-like form within its design, representing the threshold between awareness and paralysis. It is the moment before the dread manifests, time, pressure and gaze combined.

The overall experience aims to make the user feel dread rather than see it directly, an emotion that creeps slowly, amplified through repetition, looking at forms and restrained movement.

Pressure

Concept:
The experiment pressure visualises the intensity of societal and personal expectations, how they close in, watch, and confine. It reflects the sensation of being under scrutiny, of feeling the weight of others' standards pressing inward until movement itself becomes restricted.

Hallway:
The hallway is lined with framed eyes that stare directly toward the door, not at the user, creating an indirect and uncomfortable tension. This visual hierarchy builds anticipation, as if even the environment expects something of you. Each glance reinforces the psychological weight of being judged before you act.

Corridor:
The corridor amplifies this pressure through a dark, enclosed environment filled with animated eyes. Their constant gaze follows the user as they scroll, surrounding them in an atmosphere of surveillance and expectation. The repetition and movement of the eyes create a physical sense of unease and intensity, mirroring social pressure itself.

Door:
The door combines tightly wound coils and a single, dominating central eye. The coils signify containment, energy held under strain, while the lone eye represents the peak of awareness and tension. The composition feels dense, almost suffocating, visually communicating the point where pressure turns into paralysis.

Pressure transforms observation into confinement. Through layers of gaze, pattern and spatial compression, it embodies the mental and emotional strain of being seen, but never fully understood.

ENDLESS

A looping hallway that never resolves; doors lead back to previous spaces. Subtle motion parallax keeps users questioning progress, invoking a quiet panic through monotony.

01 Concept