New Work: Cleveland Museum of Art
With top-notch collections in Asian art, Greek and Roman art, and European painting and sculpture, including significant works by Picasso, El Greco, Caravaggio and Pousin, among many others, the Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the world’s great art museums. It is also a vital part of its local community, a beloved institution that plays an integral role in the cultural life of Cleveland and its residents. The museum is committed to making its collections accessible to all—unlike most museums today, it has a policy of free admission to the public, a mandate established in its founding charter—and presents smart programming that consistently challenges and engages visitors.
From 2005 to 2009 the CMA undertook an extensive expansion that included a complete renovation of its 1916 Beaux Arts building and 1971 addition by Marcel Breuer, and the construction of a new East Wing designed by Rafael Vinoly, which opened last summer. The expansion has increased the size of the museum by 41 percent, allowing more of its collection to be put on view.
Now the museum has launched a new website that provides enhanced access to its collection. Designed by Lisa Strausfeld and Takaaki Okada, in collaboration with Michael Bierut (who took art classes at the museum as a child), the site is focused on serving the needs of the museum’s two primary audiences: the local member who visits regularly to view art and experience museum events, and the global art enthusiast who comes for the museum’s astounding collection. Users can create their own profiles, customize their experience of the museum, and share favorite works and museum events. The site creates an experience that is immediately engaging and, in the words of the museum, “visually addictive,” placing the museum’s objects front and center.
The visual design carries the collection’s footprint in a “light-table” view—a grid—that is used throughout the site. Every object of art, collection, curator, event and message is represented by an individual “card”; these cards, or pieces of information, flow into the grid. The sequence of cards changes depending on the user’s specific interests and museum events and programming; using tags, the cards can be curated or highlighted for specialized use—to create an individual member’s calendar, for instance, or to spotlight the works in a current exhibition. The site is intentionally “shallow,” surfacing all relevant options for each topic and eliminating multiple clicks down a typical top-down hierarchical navigation structure.
While the content presented on the site is infinitely flexible, the structure is relentless. The grid organizes the stream of information in every section. The size of the grid and the cards can be adjusted, changing scale as needed for the type of content or the number of appropriate messages displayed. (The grid is also tweaked slightly in the Calendar view, where it appears in a vertical day-planner format.) The headline at the top of text cards identifies what is behind the card; the tag at the bottom is the content category. When a user clicks on a card, a larger panel opens that contains detailed information, images, related links, audio and video. The site also gives a new prominence to the museum identity, designed by LaPlaca Cohen.
At its most fundamental, the site functions as a catalogue of the museum’s collection of over 40,000 objects. Pieces from the collection are integrated in all sections and pages of the site, but they are the focus of the Collection section. Here users can create tags for objects, leave comments and share items with their friends via social media. Visitors can become familiar with the collections, view profiles of the curators (surprisingly few museum sites do this), check on recent acquisitions, and view “New Perspectives,” a series of videos on individual works in the museum collection.
Project Team: Lisa Strausfeld, partner-in-charge and designer; Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer; Takaaki Okada, designer. Site development: Lucrum.