| Previews | Susanna Speier - Design for Life - Review | Calendar |
| Up to MM Magazine | On to Review Index | UpUp to MM Home |
|
Susanna Speier
|
||
|
Name: Design for Life: A Centennial Celebration Design: Elisabeth Roxby, ROXX.COM http://www.si.edu/ndm/dfl/ New York,September 1997 |
Elizabeth Roxby's Design for Life website supplements the centennial exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, celebrating 100 years of collecting. It constitutes one of several sub-sites within the museum's general website. Design for Life site is structured to match the curatorial framework of the real-life exhibition. The website's uniqueness lies in its ability to present a plethora of material with simplicity, structure, technical virtuosity and a meticulous attention to detail. The site begins with a homepage divided into three categories: 'Daily Life', 'Shaping Space' and 'Communication'. The notion of 'three' also sets the design context for the rest of the site. Compositionally, its frames follow the rule of thirds. Whatever margin the image offsets itself from, nothing hits the viewer dead centre. Compositional virtuosity is also clear in Roxby's choice of background colours. Olive drab, surgeon greyish-blue, and mustard yellow backgrounds don't distract, but instead support the images that are either in front of or next to them, much in the way that neutral colours of a museum wall do. Roxby's site exemplifies classic html at its most articulate. Tables are used to collage images together and position the accompanying texts. Images fit together with jigsaw-puzzle congruency. Roxby has a great sense of positioning text on the page. Thanks to the use of Mathew Carter's Verdana font, which was designed especially for the screen, the text is always clear and readable. Few pages require scrolling but instead demand that the viewer experience the image in its entirety, an aesthetic which perhaps more website designers could adopt. One can surf smoothly and quickly through the site. There are subcategories within the general topics. A Christian altar book can be found under the general topic of 'communication' and the specific subtopic of 'worship'. To find a Coca Cola storyboard, you have to go through 'communication' to get to 'advertising'. The homepage not only serves as a location reminder, but, upon returning to it, the viewer is also reminded of the context of the object within the exhibition. The browsing process evokes the stroll you might take through an actual museum. The viewer is encouraged to skim before focusing on a particular item. Once an area of the site has been entered, a brief but in-depth introduction explains the relevance of the particular subject before the actual exhibition items are viewed. You can wander, item by item, through the website as if it were a physical space. The options are continuous. Close-ups are provided wherever details matter. Explanations cut to the core, so that the surfer is never bludgeoned by info-overkill. The site provides the opportunity to zoom in on details that you can only assume are Roxby's personal favourites. Her most extravagant re-creation is a page from an Alice in Wonderland pop-up book, in which the Cheshire Cat disappears and reappears. You could only experience this phenomenon more closely by interacting with the Cheshire Cat himself. This site is, among other things, a research tool. With an itemised alphabetical index, designers, researchers, historians and collectors can find fabrics, fans and flashlights within clicks. It's unfortunate that such a valuable research resource contains no external hyperlinks. All links on the site are internal ones, connecting only to other areas of the Cooper Hewitt Museum's website. But even so, a researcher who finds it via a standard Internet search engine wouldn't necessarily need to look any further, let alone enter a real museum at all. This review is an excerpt from the book Website Graphics Now, an international source book on the best in Global site design. Website Graphics Now was edited by Mediamatic and published in July 1999 by BIS Publishers in co-operation with Thames and Hudson. For more information on Website Graphics Now read the introduction, or see the complete selection.
|
| Previews | Susanna Speier - Design for Life - Review | Calendar |
| Up to MM Magazine | On to Review Index | UpUp to MM Home |