Overview
A fresh new web application look and experience for the Georgia O’Keeffe’s museum collections in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Showcasing the esteemed artist and making sure her work shines on every page.
Art Direction by Lisa Battle and UX Direction from Duane Degler. Project done for Design for Context. Development was done by DFC. Brian works with a variety of advertising agencies and design studios, please reach out to see how he can be integrated with your teams.
Challenge
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s site was dated and needed a complete overhaul. Brian White Design working with Design for Context took initial wireframes and sketches, iterated and built a new design system for an easier to use and overall cleaner website application.
Our project approach and deliverables
- Collective brain-storming sessions
- Ideation & Styles
- Design System
- Supplemental Wireframing
- Icon Design
- Responsive Web Design
Wireframes & Design System
Through a series of meetings and concept sprints iterating on the UX and wireframes DFC provided, we came up with a design system that worked great for the project. The system was adaptable to the templates making the art work and archives easy to showcase, filter, and dive into the details. We built out secondary wireframes to fill out the design system as the project continued.
Homepage
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
The entire project was designed for shifting to various screen sizes.
OUR CHOSEN HOMEPAGE
This was our choice for the homepage hero design. Sadly it didn’t make it. It showcased O’Keeffe in various stages throughout her life which mimics the archives. The colored bars tie into the various exhibition colors and accents throughout the designs.
Artwork collections
Brian fell in love with this painting called 3 Zinnias, 1921. We used it as a test for many modules and screens. Look below to see the actual piece.
filtered pieces
Everything had to give room for the artwork. There were multiple pieces that were narrow and a few that were extremely wide. This created as challenge as none of the work could be cropped as per O’Keefe’s curator’s instructions.
elements
With the system in place, we designed a simple hover menu to quickly view the piece at full scale or jump to the details in the full record. All design was done in Figma with extensive components to scale with variable sized artwork. By using the same designer for both web design and icons, the project was done on time and professionally matches.
details
Whenever possible we pushed to have larger shots of the artwork available to show the beauty in the details. We had to create three types of artwork sections; square, landscape, and portrait.
EXHIBITIONS
We used a subtle color pattern to showcase the various Museums where the traveling exhibitions were showcased. It was fun to see the exhibition photos from the archives that dated back over 75 years ago.
archives
The archives for Georgia O’Keefe is extensive and the design system needed to include all sorts of household objects, papers, and photographs. The user experience was a challenge as there were so many layers. The DFC development team did a great job translating the designs to a working site.
THE MUSEUM
Brian took a quick road trip out to the Albuquerque / San Antonio area to see a cousin with his daughter this Spring. He spent a good part of the day at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum and soaked in the work. Brian is also a painter and it was an honor to design the site for the museum and DFC.
WHAT CAN I
MAKE FOR YOU?
I work with organizations of all shapes and sizes.
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