Prints and Printmaking

Australia, Asia, Pacific

I designed the skins that make up this extensive resource site run by the National Gallery of Australia.

The site is running a highly customised version of the dot net nuke framework, and John O'Brien at Soul Solutions is the talented code guy.

We decided to have a substantial left margin, which looks odd at first but once you start using the site it becomes functional as it holds the images related to your searches.

One of our main goals was to simplify the results pages, because there is so much data involved it's important that it is clear and easily accessible.

There is a now an options link on most pages, which brings down a little ajax box containing the display options for the page. It's great because it gives us somewhere to put all that text that is important but a pain to integrate into the design.

Visit it at: printsandprintmaking.gov.au.

Best in the world

Prints and Printmaking took out the best research site award at the international museums and the web conference in 2008, held in Montreal.

Here's what they had to say about the site:

"...an impressive gateway reference site. This is what a reference site should be. It covers a wide territory, with a clearly defined focus, but also covering many aspects of that subject. It includes biographical and institutional information, exhibitions and bibliographies, as well as 45,000 works. The information is simply and clearly presented."

Other winners were sites from the TATE and London Science Museum.

Here is the full winners list.

New search technologies

John, has set up a very clever thing called Cool Iris to work with our search results.
PicLens is a free plugin that works in firefox, safari and even internet explorer. It transforms static pages of images into one long, seemingly endless, 3d wall.

John has written a blog with a video showing exactly how Cool Iris works on the Prints and Printmaking website.

 

Visit it at: printsandprintmaking.gov.au.

Past work