The Whitney Museum’s new website, which has been a big part of our practice for the past year, is live to the public now. So you know where it is, the website is black at night and white in the day, and it has its own sunrise and sunset New York time. To build it, more than 64,000 page versions were created in our new CMS, Economy, by 63 different authors.
We’re especially proud of the collection area, which is easy to use and shows images big. You can make your own collection (which you can share with other people), stream and download really great video and audio, and much more. Check out the search results and the “New content” RSS feeds, they’re fun. We’ll be writing more about this project soon… Programming: with GrayBits.
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this is an embarrassment.
Sorry you don’t like it! Feedback from the site’s users has actually been very good up to now but we’ll see! It certainly seems to split some designers and web developers into camps. If you have any specific criticisms this might actually be an interesting place to discuss them.
Hardly an embarrassment. Fantastic work. I keep discovering new things to play with and explore. Keep ‘em coming…
Hey kids, I dig it! I was playing with it a bunch today and have very much enjoyed the site. Also I’ve been reading some of the ‘reviews’ that Andrew showed me, which I find very funny after having played around because most of the points of complaint are things I thought were great! Also, it made me so happy to find the photo of Karel looking at the Jasper Johns!
Strange that one of the most interesting things about the Whitney – the building – is buried in a link WAAY down at the bottom of the page.
David I agree.. to your point, an ambitious feature that focused on the building as well as stories from the institution’s past, present, and future, was pulled from the launch at the last minute to allow more time to improve the content. I am not sure if that feature will get completed or if other content development will now take priority, but anyway your values are shared by all. In the interim, the building ought to be promoted on the homepage in the same way the new building project is; I’ll bring this up. The “Collection” slideshow on the homepage does use installation views to at least provide some sense of mise en scene, a goal expressed to us, and by us, from the start.
Stay tuned for a lot of interesting content improvements actually. The homepage itself is designed to be a very flexible surface. And more significantly, individual artist and artwork pages, which now focus on compelling images of the art objects, and captions, are actually flexible wiki pages capable of accommodating all kinds of content – even though this capacity hasn’t been used too much yet, except a few additional installation views on some artwork pages, and a neat browsable journal of Edward Hopper, which may be a good sign of what’s to come. I think the museum is relatively near completing a set of discursive texts for almost every? online artwork, and complementary media assets (e.g. related video and audio on artwork pages) shouldn’t be far behind. Again we’ll see what they actually pull off since this writing and content development task is not trivial; but their ambitions in this area are very impressive, unique, and exciting, and it seems to me like it is in fact going to happen.
This is great. Really smart, lots of things to discover and get lost in, seems fitting for a museum website. Great work guys!
guys, this is a real nice piece. congratulations.
Don’t confuse the content with the design. One has nothing to do with the other than for the fact that the layout should best compliment the content and help guide site visitors through it to the best experience.
I will congratulate you on getting it deployed, but beyond that the site does not do the collection or the museum itself justice. I hate to complain for the sake of it, being typically English, but really … come on guys!
With so much prior art in museum web site design and some great ideas coming out of places like Sumo Design, you have NO excuses.
Have you stopped accepting comments? I hope not.
I was curious to know if you had a response to Edward Tufte, Perry Garvin or Vincent Roman’s reviews of the site.
Hi GZ, we’re finishing up a text that does describe our goals and approaches in more depth, yes. We want to give it another week or so also for things to settle out a bit, and make sure we know how users are using the site, what the criticisms are etc.
One more review can be found at Mediaite by the way.
Our experience with actual users attempting to use the site hasn’t really been anything but extremely positive – so far! In terms of navigating the site, we’ve seen users accomplish what they are trying to do extremely efficiently – more efficiently than they would on most other museum websites, I’d bet you (though we didn’t try head-to-head comparisons). Of course the site’s not perfect. But my point is that it’s hard to take rule-based critiques of the usability, per se, too seriously in light of our experience watching users with the site, and hearing from some users post-launch. Not that there’s anything wrong with rules, but of course every rule has not only exceptions but also other competing possible rules, approaches, and trade-offs.
Besides speculation about the usability, what can I tell you… :) Some designers and web developers really like the site, some hate it, some must be ambivalent. A successful review, I think, would attempt to interweave a discussion of the site’s visual design, content (from heavy things like the presentation of art, to everyday things like public events), usability, and feel (layout is a facet that connects some of those things). Ideally without resorting so exclusively to comparison with best practices, which isn’t without value but also isn’t really the mark of critical sophistication in other disciplines, when you think about it. I thought Tufte’s paragraph was nice, in that way.
I agree with you (in theory) that best practices shouldn’t always take precedence, but I’m not really sure how 404 errors, misplaced meta descriptions and irritating favicons imbue the site with critical sophistication. It just looks like sloppy work to me…
Kiera thanks for your comment. We’re working to get Google’s meta description improved, which is a confusion on Google’s part that predates the new site. To my knowledge there are not many 404 errors during navigation of the new site. Any that are found, I’m sure the museum is fixing as fast as possible.
Excellent work guys! I’m waiting to see criticism that goes beyond “ugly” and that is more informed and specific.
This is fun. I like it!!
The only thing that I really don’t like is that gradient on the the right hand side. Looks like a mistake.
Perhaps fade to a neutral gray? Right now it’s just a bit too strong as it stands.
Also perhaps the concept would be more apparent if the dark vs bright background is accompanied with time – it’s ambient, sure, but I think that it can use some tweaks… just my very subjective opinion.
Nice work!
Cheers, SML
MCM: Excellent work guys! I’m waiting to see criticism that goes beyond “ugly” and that is more informed and specific.
Plenty of quality feedback here: http://www.perrygarvin.net/blog/2009/11/12/whitney-website-redesign/
And here: http://www.vincentroman.com/blog/a-review-of-the-new-whitney-website/
There is obviously a lot to learn. There are some good points here.