Denver Art Museum: The Psychedelic Experience
Slice of Lime created the strategy, design, and development for the new Denver Art Museum exhibit, “The Psychedelic Experience.”
Strategy
We started by exploring the strategy of the overall project, diving into goals and target demographic. While the exhibit would definitely appeal to the 60s generation, creating something as accessible as possible to a wide range of museum-goers would be key.
We opted to “get out of the way” of the design and let the artwork speak for itself. The posters created during this era are incredibly rich and intricate. Adding too much to the design surrounding the posters would only detract from the art.
We also decided to integrate one of the exhibits interactive components with the website. Visitors to the exhibit can leave video messages about their thoughts on the 60s. These videos get automatically uploaded to YouTube. We coded the website to automatically pull these YouTube videos into the online experience.
Design
The magnificence of these posters speak for themselves. We purposively created a minimalist design to help showcase the bright colors and intricacies of the artwork.
We also carried a few themes through to the website that exist in the show. For example, some of our headlines use a vibrating color technique used in the 60s with quotes from the era.
We also incorporated the artist’s actual signatures and quotes from those artists.
Development
We made sure that the site was coded to be completely scalable. Every page can be managed by the staff at The Denver Art Museum. As posters were added at the last minute to the exhibit, they instantly showed up on the homepage, the poster overview page, and the poster detail page.
We used Wordpress to manage the site content, posters, and artist information. We used Flash and some other Javascript tools to create a smooth experience as a user navigates the website. Watch the video below for a taste of what it’s like to navigate The Psychedelic Experience website.
This exhibit is running March 21, 2009 – July 19, 2009 in Denver. We’d highly recommend checking it out. It’s an amazing installation that brings a deep appreciation to an art form that’s not normally recognized. The exhibit also includes many interactive aspects like creating your own poster.
We were honored to create the companion website and to see how well the work we did contributed to the exhibit itself and visa versa. Once again, working with the great folks at The Denver Art Museum was…far out.
Tags: wordpress
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