Tradition and Transformation, the first stage of an exciting new project that aims to bring the extensive collection of National Gallery of Victoria to Victorian schools via online and interactive technologies.
The brief
I was asked to participate in workshops to help plan the information architecture and interaction design for two micro-sites for school students. The resulting wireframes would go to a graphic designer and then I would develop the HTML and CSS for those templates.
The Solution
Melissa Cater ran the ideas workshop, an informal discussion and pooling of ideas that resulted in wireframes and business rules for the Tradition and Transformation website. I attended to champion good usability and accessibility, and so that I could see what was being devised, in anticipation of building the HTML and CSS templates later in the process.
The brief was to use works in the gallery’s collection to tell stories about Australian and Torres Strait Islander artists and their work. We built on the ideas and information generated for an exhibition called Colour Power that had been shown a few years previously.
As the works were from all over Australia, we decided that an interactive map would be a useful entry point to the information about the artworks and artists. We also devised a series of text and image-based entry pages that showcased and enabled investigation of the art and associated information.
Our wireframes were then supplied to the designer Anna Nicholson at Paste, who worked her magic and returned psds for me to convert to HTML/CSS. When I had the code written for the front end, I supplied the templates to the NGV developer to integrate into the bespoke CMS devised to manage the content.
The resulting website has been nominated for education and website awards.