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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Filed under: Technology

What a year. I can’t believe it is almost over. We have covered a lot of ground at the IMA. There are now 21 partners on ArtBabble! The IMA has been rolling out a new brand and I’m so excited to share that with you in 2010 with the launch of our new website.  Stay tuned for updates on that soon! We created an iTouch application in-house for Sacred Spain. The 100 Acres Art & Nature Park is getting closer every day to being ready for the 2010 opening (see The Launch of Eden II). We revealed the Indianapolis Museum of Art is adding a scientific research and analytical laboratory to its existing paintings, paper, objects and textiles conservation laboratories. For all of those reason’s I’m pretty excited to get started in 2010. But before I forget, seems like this would be a good time to reminisce over my favorite/worst things of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Current Events, Musings, New Media, Technology

So how did ArtBabble get to where it is? I’ll let the graphics do the talking. We have posted a handful of interface design mockups which were considered for this project in a Flickr set. What started off a slick techie look (I was way off!) morphed into the hand drawn, yet clean and casual website you see today. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Design, Technology

Following up on Matt’s great post about web design tricks is a hard act to follow, but an awesome post I saw last week gives me some inspiration and a great way to spend a bit of time.

I’d been aware of the COLOURlovers site for a while and always thought it was cool.  The site is a bit like social media meets the paint chip display at your local hardware store.  I’m always amazed at the variety of colors and associations on display at these when I’m shopping for paint.  Whether its something obvious like “Slate Blue” or mysterious like “Dusty Cairo”, I’ve always thought that the guy/gal that names the colors has a great job!

That’s why I was pretty intrigued by the COLOURlovers post about Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. This post is a great example of how inspirational some of the works of art in our collections can be for designers and artists looking for their muse.  Somehow, to me, pulling these colors out of their context makes me think about them differently?  I decided to give it a try myself!  Setting up and account and creating palettes turned out to be a really easy and enjoyable experience.  Check out my colour lovin’ palettes!

Not to knock on Van Gogh, but I think there are a lot of great works of art to get your color inspiration from here at the IMA! I picked out several of our favorite works from among the web folks here and created palettes for them.  You can even feature images and descriptions of the things that inspired your color crafty-ness.  I used these to link back into our collection and provided images of the works of art.  I’ll admit, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be and it did cause me to pay more attention to the artist’s choices.  Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: New Media, Technology

I thought I would use my space on the blog this week to give you a sneak peek of the new website we are creating for the upcoming show, Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty.

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Filed under: Exhibitions, New Media