SPOILER ALERT: If you’d rather skip all the words and play with the new site, scroll to the end of this post, find the groundhog and watch the short video for login instructions.
One great pleasure of working in a creative environment like an art museum is that on occasion, we actually get to create things that are unique, tangible, and if we’ve done our job… useful.
Matt Gipson - Web Designer Extraordinaire
It’s one of the reasons I love to cook. The process of pulling together all the right ingredients and a little skill to create a delightful experience that can be shared with others seems so personal, meaningful, visceral. In short, very different from most of what keeps me busy on most days. So, it was a great honor to have the chance over the last six months to work together with so many talented staff from around the museum in creating and reformulating a new website for the IMA.
Over the last several years, the IMA has invested a lot of energy and resource in understanding and making use of the web in ways that help the museum meet its goals and carry out its mission. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot. We are constantly learning from our audience and visitors – watching the way they interact with content, reading comments, and listening to feedback. We’ve learned immensely through our relationships and collaborations with other museums about what has worked and not in the past and about new thoughts, strategies and approaches we might try. If I’m honest, we’ve definitely learned the most from our failures. Hopefully, we’ve disguised most of them cleverly, but come join us for a beer in the cafe and we’ll share a bunch of the “less-than-superstar” moments.
In talking about how we might launch this new site we’ve been working so hard on, it only seemed right to give the first sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes privileges to our online followers. So, like any great dish, this one’s hot off the grill and just for you!
One of the first things you’ll notice about the new website is that we’ve gone with a completely different design-feel from our earlier site. Part of this is inspired by a new brand for the IMA which you’ll notice featured prominently across the site. We wanted to shoot for a design that is clean and well structured, but still very visual and full of color. You’ll notice that we stuck to a consistent grid layout on the site which lets us be pretty modular in the way we mix and match content.
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When viewing an artwork on the website you will notice a section called TELL US WHAT YOU SEE in the right sidebar. This is the area where you can interact with the page by providing your own tags. It also displays the top tags provided by users for this work. When you enter your own tags they will be highlighted in a color matching the IMA logo on the page.
