Birmingham Museum of Art Site Design
With support from my old agency, Range, I partnered with BMA’s team as their digital development arm to revamp their website, execute various technological projects, & expand their online collections.
The Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) houses a diverse collection of more than 26,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative arts dating from ancient to modern times. Their mission is to provide an unparalleled cultural and educational experience to a diverse community by collecting, presenting, interpreting, and preserving works of art of the highest quality.
I worked with the BMA to redesign their website. We utilized a limited color palette of black, grey, and white with pops of red.
Revamped Collections
Up until recently, BMA’s collection was only partially online and missing key metadata. To fix this, BMA tapped us to integrate Piction and WordPress for a seamless collection experience. Piction is a digital media warehouse that can manage all types of digital content including images, video, audio, and documents. One of Piction’s strengths is its ability to maintain a variety of metadata and flags associated with each media item. This means we can now set many search parameters to see any work of art that is flagged for online display.
When designing the new collections display, we kept high fidelity images of pieces in mind (possible via Piction!). To really allow users to explore these images, we incorporated a zoom feature where you can see the piece in high-definition.
Ongoing Site Maintenance and Improvements
Besides hosting, upgrades, and regular maintenance, we work with BMA to execute various micro-projects on their site each year. These include freshening up event pages and updating calendar functions. We also worked with their team to execute the “Adopt an Artwork” initiative where we designed and developed a micro-project intended to fund and raise awareness for art restoration. The BMA relies on us to execute their ever growing list of site needs and we’re happy to be there for them.