Discover more than 100 striking objects spanning 2,000 years of ancient Egyptian history in Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs at the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition’s only stop in the Rocky Mountain West. Visit Denver and the Denver Art Museum tasked Slice of Lime with creating a website to promote the exhibit and its hotel partners.
The main navigation allows the user to easily browse information about the exhibit, plan their visit to the Denver Art Museum, purchase show tickets, and book hotel packages. King Tut objects and imagery can be found throughout the site, providing a sneak peak into the exhibit’s many fascinating features.
To explore the splendor of the pharaohs starting July 11th, visit www.tutdenver.com.
Denver Art Museum is one of our favorite clients to work with and it was a pleasure to create the strategy, design, and development for their new Embrace! exhibition site. The website’s main goal is to promote the 17 world-class contemporary artists selected to create one-of-a-kind installations specifically for the Embrace! exhibition before and during its life at the Denver Art Museum.
Slice of Lime developed a clean navigation and design that showcases the show’s installations and artists. As with our earlier DAM projects, the site content is easily managed through Wordpress on the backend. Dynamic plug-ins included a scrolling jQuery billboard on the homepage, photos from a Flickr feed, timelapse videos, artist audio clips and a Twitter feed. Advertised through the Museum’s various social media outlets, the show has gathered attention and applause for utilizing the unique Hamilton Building design in a “more ambitious, and global, direction.”
We sincerely hope you’ll plan a visit to the Embrace! show between now and April 4, 2010.
The Denver Art Museum’s Creativity Resource for Teachers website makes it easy to learn about different pieces at the museum and create associated lesson plans.
Strategy
We started by defining the target demographic and goals of the project. The main user of this website would be teachers with varying technical abilities. We therefore needed to create a site that, while feature rich, would be easy for any type of user to navigate. We kept navigation to a minimum and built in tools to create rich experiences within the content of each page.
Design
We carried elements from the main Denver Art Museum website forward into the Creativity Resource for Teachers website. This helps maintain a visual consistency for the Denver Art Museum brand. We combined pictures of students learning with the art pieces themselves on the homepage to illustrate the focus of the website.
Icons and calls to action across the site are big and colorful. From a usability perspective, we wanted all features to be clear and easy to use. View the video below to see a typical path a teacher might take through the site.
Development
We used Wordpress to power all of the content of the site, from storing images, videos, and audio to organizing lesson plans and lesson plan authors. The staff at The Denver Art Museum has access to Wordpress so that they can easily manage all of the content on the site and add new content over time.
We also added Flash, AJAX, and jQuery on top of Wordpress to enhance the front-end user experience. Sorting the art images, for example, pulls content from Wordpress dynamically using AJAX (see image below).
We had a great time working on this project. The site has received extremely positive feedback from the teacher community and we are continuing to make enhancements based on teacher recommendations.
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.
Slice of Lime designed and developed the new Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) website. Every element on the new website, from exhibits to events to artists, is dynamically driven through a custom back-end administration tool built by Slice of Lime. The tool makes it easy for any BMoCA staff member to easily add images, exhibits, podcast archives, performances, events, education activities, and artists to the website. It also allows BMoCA to collect ticket sales through their website and manage their calendar of events.The front-end design was built to easily scale with BMoCA over time. Coded using web standards, the layout, design, and content can quickly be modified. The site is now coded with accessibility in mind, making it easier for the visually impaired to learn more about the museum.The design is minimalist, allowing the amazing artwork at the museum to come to the forefront. A new search feature makes it easy to find the artist or event you’re looking for.Slice of Lime was happy to donate its time to such a worthwhile project. We’d like to thank the incredible staff at the museum for working with us on a website that we hope will support you for years to come.
