Center for Urban Pedagogy’s new website is live! The new site brings together all the great programs, projects, workshops, and events that CUP regularly initiates, in a fun way – it reminds us of their office. In the gutters of each page are a changing series of playful icons extracted from those activities and linked to them. The website also features a store where the output from each collaboration may be purchased or downloaded – so buy some merchandise and help CUP continue to generate interesting, informative projects in the future! And, come join us at their launch party on Thursday Jan 19. Congrats, Brian! More on Flickr
After designing the Whitney Museum’s website in 2010, in 2011 we introduced a major new area for kids: Whitney For Kids. The new site turns the main Whitney website’s design grammar on its head, keeping some of the same structure and attitude but giving it a whole new look. Kids can explore all the same artists and artworks as adults can, but in their own design language, and dozens of artist and artwork pages have all new, richly engaging kid-specific content.
Kids can also do a lot more than adults. They can make their own pages on the Whitney’s website, using a kid-friendly version of the same content management system used by Whitney staff. They can take quizzes and polls, tag artworks, collect art, upload their own art, and browse the art of both Whitney artists and other kids. And they can change the background pattern of the whole website, for all to see, using a fun and educational tool.
The design has been described as “hallucinatory” and kids really seem to connect with it, using the site in many different ways. Some slowly explore all the art; others just want to make their own pages and add tags. Those approaches map to two major approaches of the site: Emphasize parallels and connections between kids and artists; and create a discursive space, like a crowd of kids in a museum who can all hear and see each other talking about and reacting to what’s around them. More text and images
Congratulations Mary!
Our new website for Greengrassi, the London art gallery, has just launched. Obviously it’s red. The site emphasizes images, acting as a visual archive that can repay in-depth exploration better than many gallery websites do. More images
With artist Julia Kim Smith, we’ve launched 100 Survivors, a collaborative photo and video project for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Through a Flickr group, participants contribute photos responding to 12 prompts, so the site exposes both commonalities and radical differences in women’s experiences and voices, and includes both familiar snapshots of everyday life and highly specific interests and observations. The site begins with a mutable diptych that appears as the last user left it, and you can also see the diptych’s history. Julia writes that the site “hopes to inform and inspire by looking beyond ‘awareness’ and ‘supporting the cause’ and focusing on the experiences of actual women with breast cancer.” Please share! Facebook
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We’ve launched a new online arts calendar for Yale. For the first time, this calendar brings arts events and performances from many institutions and departments across this large university, together onto one surface. Members of the public can find something that interests them, and students at the undergraduate and graduate level can use the calendar as a tool to stimulate collaboration across disciplines and to find inspiration.
This is our illustration for today’s Bloomberg News opinion piece on cellphone network censorship... Worth reading.
Most of our work is processes that develop over time. There is the process of developing a design, but also the life of a design after the project “launches.” When we design a website or an exhibition, we want it to go places we didn’t imagine after we “release” it. Even though this is the most natural condition in the world, we’re fascinated by it, and we try to embed an acknowledgement of this condition into our working process, and into the software and designs we develop. We symbolized this with the sunset on the Whitney, the changing colors of Making Policy Public, and the most recently visited building photos on the Yale map, to name a few.
Check out our new contribution for Parallelograms, and be sure to check back periodically!
This new site helps organize information about the political imprisonment this week of artist Ai Weiwei. Built in collaboration with our friends at ArtAsiaPacific and elsewhere.
Please spread the word: Tweet
Thanks Laurel!
Update: Lisson Gallery in London puts up a banner on its facade with a link to our site for more information, as Ai Weiwei’s work goes on display…
We’re really excited about the launch of ArtAsiaPacific’s new site, the online version of an English-language magazine that covers contemporary art from Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. As a magazine, the site is optimized for reading on the iPad and iPhone as well as regular computers, including “next” and “previous” buttons that always take you to the next thing to read. To make the content more accessible to the same readers who might not be able to purchase the printed version, we made many articles available through the website in Arabic and Chinese. The site also features an online store, an area for web-specific projects commissioned by the magazine, a lively blog, and an interactive almanac. Since the launch, staff have already published two new issues through the new system (the fifth Economy site), and have been using the site in creative ways. More images
For about the past year, we’ve been working with the Whitney on a project to integrate their website with their membership system, Raiser’s Edge. This was a complex three-way project that involved collaboration with the developers of Raiser’s Edge and the creation of new behind-the-scenes web services, and it launched today. As a result, users of whitney.org can now manage their museum membership online, and see a reminder at the top of each webpage when their membership is about to expire. In calendars throughout the site, users see a “For you” badge on special events for their membership level (a feature that nicely complements the Curate Your Own Membership project and the “your collection” feature of the website), and even users who aren’t members of the museum can customize their calendars on the website to highlight events in categories that interest them. The Whitney can also now show any content on whitney.org conditionally to particular users, such as an announcement or solicitation targeted to users in a particular membership category. Congratulations Bridget and everyone who worked on this project so steadily!
The Whitney has just re-launched its Watch & Listen area, a redesign we’ve been immersed in for some time. Have a look around, the content is pretty addictive. Everything is inter-linked, tagged, and sharable, and podcasts and downloads are available. It works on your iPhone too. A neat feature is the ability to quickly make your own playlists. This feature is integrated with making other kinds of collections on the site (artworks, events, etc.). Thanks Brian!
We launched a new site for the production company and design studio, Brand New School. We’re excited that it’s the fourth installation of our modular content management system, Economy – the first three being the Yale School of Art, the Environmental Performance Index, and the Whitney Museum. It’s fun to compare the 1 2 3 4.
A central metaphor for this new site is an infinite set of shelves that holds both finished projects and bits of inspirations and creative expressions that can be uploaded by all BNS employees. In addition, all visitors to the site can re-edit BNS reels and start their own reels, using the same easy-to-use tool we developed for BNS to share custom reels with their clients. Read more...
Earlier this year we redesigned the Environmental Performance Index for 2010. (We also did the 2008 site.) The EPI is a global measurement and ranking of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This new design tries to be accessible to an even wider audience, emphasizes interactive maps more, and lets you see many facets of a country’s performance at a glance. Learning from Fusedspace, the new design also features “trails”, allowing you to “walk” from one country another along many paths, comparing countries along the way. More images.
Ryan Gander’s new public sculpture is on view from today. This is our second project with Public Art Fund: website (lots of great material), invitation, sign, street banners, and magazine advertising. The identity and website work as a kind of disjointed fairy tale.
We just launched a cute new interface for the Whitney’s new Curate Your Own Membership feature. You can mix and match different benefits to create a custom annual membership for yourself. The Whitney is apparently the first major museum to do this, and it’s in keeping with a number of other bespoke features on the website, some live already and some coming soon. The idea also reinforces the rich variety of programming and experiences available at the Whitney, something our web design has also always tried to emphasize. In this new interface, you color a badge as you design your membership.
Identity, printed matter, signage, and website for the Public Art Fund’s new outdoor exhibition, Statuesque. The exhibit focuses on contemporary figurative sculpture by Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago and others. Our identity stacks all the content on top of a base made of Albertus, a typeface from the 1930s inspired by raised bronze lettering in public inscriptions. We made it even more 3D. It’s installed in City Hall Park, right around the corner from our office; the work is great if you want to visit.
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. More images.
In our second collaboration with Geoff Han, we designed & launched a new identity and website for Solid Objectives, the architecture partnership of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. This website’s goal is an almost physical density or fullness, organized. It is a blog built on WordPress. Each category of post has its own layout, all using the same grid; so that there is a relationship between form and program that evolves as you explore the site. More...
Making Policy Public is a neat initiative of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. We just designed & launched the new website for it.
If you are a designer, you have from now until June 16 to apply to be paired up with one of four advocacy groups. If you’re selected, you’ll work with that group to design an informational poster about either predatory lending & credit, detention and deportation, street vending, or barriers faced by previously incarcerated job-seekers. There is a $1000 stipend. I hope some of you guys apply! More images...
The Environmental Performance Index (link is to the 2008 site, see also our new 2010 design and data) is a global measurement and ranking of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This year’s index was released in Davos in January. We worked with its creators (the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University) to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components. More...
We launched a website for Mary Ping, the New York-based fashion designer. It starts from the bottom, which is where we put her tag, and you scroll up from there. The whole website is just the one page with all her collections on it, which felt like the dense rack of clothes we found in her studio. In collaboration with Geoff Han. More images.
We just launched a new website for Artcity a festival of contemporary art in Calgary. Our design is a hack on top of Google Maps. It was easy to make because it uses Google’s code for all aspects of the interface. Thanks to Adam and Prem at Project Projects. More...
(Update: Since the festival’s over now, the link is to a mirror of the 2007 site.)
We’ve launched an online map of the Yale University campus. You can locate 322 buildings by browsing or searching among hundreds of campus organizations and departments. Even cooler, you can reach 428 Yale websites by finding them in buildings. The map is a way to explore the Yale web as well as the Yale campus. More...
Linked by Air has launched a new website for Yale University’s School of Art. It’s a new kind of modular wiki templated and programmed by us and operated by the students, staff and faculty of the school. Lots more images...
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