The Premise
There’s a feeding station in my backyard. I set it up recently, and then the birds just showed up. A Tufted Titmouse throwing hands at a hawk twice its size. A Common Grackle running its own car alarm impression. A Downy Woodpecker so small it has to share identification challenges with beginners like some kind of hazing ritual.
I started photographing them. And then, because I’m an instructional designer and I can’t just look at something interesting without immediately wanting to build a learning experience around it, I made this.
The Design Problem
The instinct was simple: share these birds with people who don’t already care about birds. That’s a harder problem than it sounds. Field guides work for people already in the hobby. A list of names and facts works for no one. What actually creates interest in something unfamiliar is specificity, surprise, and a little control over how fast you move through it.
So the structure needed to be: you choose the bird, the bird tells you something unexpected, you leave knowing one weird thing you didn’t know before. Small, contained, replayable.
Design Decisions
Self-directed navigation
Forced linear progression through content people haven’t opted into is the fastest way to lose them. A selection screen — you choose the bird, you get the entry, you return — keeps the experience optional, returnable, and non-sequential. Those are the conditions under which curiosity actually operates.
Surprise as the selection principle
Every fun fact was chosen for one reason: it’s the fact that earns a click. The Cooper’s Hawk has asymmetrical eyes that face slightly forward and backward simultaneously. Goldfinches molt so completely that early ornithologists thought breeding and non-breeding birds were different species. Not the most accurate fact — the most surprising one. Surprise is how information becomes memorable.
Consistent format, varied content
Every entry follows the same structure: common name, Latin name, visual description, fun fact. That rhythm makes the experience feel stable even as the content changes. Consistency in format means cognitive ease — users spend their attention on the content, not figuring out the container.
The backyard as a research site
All source photography came from the feeding station. Lightroom handled the editing pass: color grading, exposure correction, pulling feather detail out of tricky backyard light. The goal wasn’t portfolio-grade nature photography — it was accuracy with atmosphere. Images that felt like the actual bird, in actual Connecticut light, in a real moment.
The Experience
Seven birds are included: Red-Shouldered Hawk, Cooper’s Hawk, Chipping Sparrow, Common Grackle, Tufted Titmouse, American Goldfinch, and Downy Woodpecker. Species descriptions and fun facts were pulled directly from All About Birds (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) — the right call for a proof of concept, where the goal is testing the interaction model, not producing original copy. In a production version, the content would be written or licensed appropriately.
The visual design prioritizes clarity over ornamentation. The birds are interesting enough on their own. The design’s job is to get out of the way.
What I’d Do Differently
The interaction model works, but there’s a ceiling on what Canva’s navigation can do. A version built in HTML and CSS could support hover states, audio clips of actual bird calls, and a genuine branching structure that tracked which birds you’d visited. This is a proof of concept; the concept has legs.
I’d also expand it seasonally. The Goldfinch looks completely different in winter, and that molt story becomes a lot more interesting with before-and-after visual documentation. There’s a series here if I want it.
And honestly: I’d want to put it in front of people who don’t watch birds and see what actually lands. That feedback loop is the part that turns a personal project into something designed.