Kemper Art Museum

Part of the Washington University in St. Louis, Kemper Art Museum is home to the education and research of the university's growing collection, featuring a selection of contemporary art from world renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, Theo van Doesburg and Josef Albers.

The museum had ambitious goals to enhance their web presence and online services, aiming to become an educational hub for university students and the broader public, while increasing productivity of staff workflows.

Leading the design of their new digital platform, we iterated with key stakeholders from each department to produce new strategies to help audiences explore and also planning for content.

Aiming to engage with varied users through research resources, interconnected content and the ability to create accounts to save, curate and share material.

We built a consistent, minimal digital brand system to help create a subtle visual expression that allowed the artwork and editorials to become the central focus, combining open and rigid grid systems with simple interactive components.

Creating strategic paths and entry points into the collection for audiences to explore. The website permeates dynamic content with editable highlights and focus points to help casual browsers to explore key works in the collection and discover their contexts.

Ensuring cross-platform accessibility, the website is fully responsive and includes unique behaviour and layouts for hand-held devices to cater to users across the globe.

Templates are made compact and filters are collapsed to help audiences focus on the content of the page.

Collection artworks include video, print, photography painting, sculpture and cover a variety of movements and mediums.

Users are able to request reproductions, save to their own personal collection through there online account, and share on social media.

Artworks include historic information such as acquisition data, provenance and exhibition history.

Exhibitions enable audiences to browse current, upcoming and the past archive of exhibitions online, filter types include onsite or online only.

The footer of the page links users to relevant material onsite for the calendar of upcoming and ongoing events.

An exhibition archive portrays all of Kemper's past exhibitions with contextual information, links to artworks in the collection as well as interconnections to other relevant material.

Users can filter by year and sort their results to assist in sifting through dates of exhibitions.

Programs reveal the day to day activities, talks and tours happening onsite at Kemper.

The template is laid out as a calendar allowing audiences to choose a date and also to sort between tours, talks and workshops, where they can book tickets online.

In order to help engage with students, faculty, educators and prospective students of Washington University in St. Louis, the museum's platform included a range of learning resources categorised into topic and learning level.