Mueseums Australasia Awards 2016 — MAPDA Award
OVERVIEW
We partnered with Culture Victoria to create a responsive website making 150 years of Victorian historical content freely accessible – to anyone in the world.
CHALLENGE
Bring order and hierarchy to everything within in the Victorian archives and ecosystem, a whooping 700 organisations with cultural collections – all without editing a single image. The challenge, then, was how to accommodate both active and passive readers: from the serious researchers’ who need fast, factually accurate, collection searches, to the more casual topic-focused reader looking for information about historical events and personal stories.
SOLUTION
By creating and refining a series of low and high fidelity prototypes, Carter developed a flexible, modular design system that highlights the scale and breadth of content whilst encouraging deeper engagement into each vertical.
Highly-customisable content modules allow for a variance in visual browsing and enable the editorial team to better articulate its stories. With optimised article pages and photo galleries address an array of consumption behaviours, from passive browsing and “snacking” on content, to digging deep into the Culture Victoria archives. With a search-to-end all searches – allowing simultaneous access to tens of collections searches all without leaving the website.
Overall, it’s a design system that encourages editorial creativity, and allows the content—not the template—determine the layout of a page. With a digital style guide for the future, the Culture Victoria internal back-end development team can now extend and enhance the website into the future. All whilst maintaining the beautiful visual design like it was day one of the site launch.
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