British Art Studies

British Art Studies is an innovative platform for high-quality research and scholarship covering subjects on British art, architecture and visual culture. One of the few completely open-access journals in the field of art history, it reflects the research of the Paul Mellon Centre and the Yale Centre for British Art. Keepthinking designed and built the website and its structure, powered by the same Qi installation as its parent website, paul-mellon-centre.com. A “digital-first” publication, the design is catered to be primarily to be read on-screen (although all content can be downloaded or read offline). PMC asked us to design this journal to offer a powerfully visual and interactive experience, connected to other websites and online resources, with its own distinctive look and feel, in order to create an absorbing, stimulating, and exciting environment for its users.

A fully responsive website, offering new models for digital publishing. As well as single-author articles, it includes interactive features that foster dialogue, discussion, and the participation of many voices—including those of readers. BAS provides responses to the challenges presented by online publishing: for example, to capture accurate citations, every paragraph and figure is attributed with a DOI—a digital object identifier—allowing users to cite exact locations simply by clicking and copying the links provided by the “DOI” buttons. Connections between different contents are made through tags and the user can select hyperlinked names of authors to reveal more.

The open-access conversations and discussions are able to be easily cited as a whole or in specific sections through the use of DOI's (digital object identifier), allowing a user to reference single paragraphs and media.

The user is able to share discussions, issues and conversations on social media and can leave comments on articles. Downloads are available and clear in the navigational structure.

A standalone feature that presents a full-screen ‘canvas’ view as a contents page where users can, by scrolling horizontally and vertically and clicking on items, discover relationships between pieces of content and follow their own journey, breaking the linear narrative present in all other article templates.