Significant Other develops a future-ready website for The Bentway

Context

Occupying the once-neglected space beneath Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, The Bentway has become a transformative civic initiative—one that reclaims urban infrastructure for public art, culture and community.
Its mission is to ignite the urban imagination.

Methodology

As an organization deeply embedded in city-building and creative placemaking, The Bentway facilitates year-round programming, public art installations, performances and civic dialogue.

With its rapid growth, the organization required a new digital platform that could:

• Centralize an increasingly complex program of events and cultural offerings.
• Reflect a bold new visual identity designed by Superfantastic
• Serve a wide array of users, from everyday visitors to artists, curators and civic partners.
• Support internal teams with more flexible and sustainable content management tools.

The overarching goal was to create a future-ready website that would foster deeper engagement, expand community access and act as a living archive of The Bentway’s evolving story.

Process

Our approach to The Bentway’s website was rooted in deep collaboration and strategic planning. We began with a series of discovery sessions involving their programming, marketing and curatorial leads to surface key goals and challenges. From these conversations, it became clear the site needed to do more than showcase events—it had to support dynamic storytelling, community engagement and operational flexibility. These insights directly informed the site architecture, which was restructured to better reflect how audiences navigate and interact with The Bentway’s diverse content.

With a refreshed visual identity from Superfantastic as our foundation, we translated static brand elements into a flexible, web-native design system. The front-end was designed to be modular, accessible and responsive across devices, while the CMS was customized to accommodate varied content types and editorial needs. We prioritized inclusive design and accessibility at every stage through thoughtful attention to type hierarchy, colour contrast and screen reader compatibility. The final product not only reflects The Bentway’s civic and cultural mission—it supports its continued evolution as a platform
for bold, imaginative public space-making.