Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / The modern museum reimagined
Website design, Website development
A World-Class Hybrid-Museum Destination
Georgia O’Keeffe changed the world of art by pushing boundaries with her bold and distinctive style. As one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, her unique vision defined American modernism. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum houses the largest repository of the artist’s work. Still grappling with challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Museum needed to adapt from a focus on their in-person experience to a hybrid model that serves online visitors while complementing their range of in-person destinations across New Mexico, including the Santa Fe Museum, the O’Keeffe Home & Studio in Abiquiu, Ghost Ranch, and more.
Threespot partnered with O’Keeffe to create a world-class destination for families, fans, researchers, academics, and educators to explore the legendary artist’s life, legacy, and spirit. We aimed to enable the Museum to forge fuller, more diverse connections with local and distant communities alike—moving beyond traditional notions of what a museum can or should be.
Threespot partnered with O’Keeffe to create a world-class destination for families, fans, researchers, academics, and educators to explore the legendary artist’s life, legacy, and spirit. We aimed to enable the Museum to forge fuller, more diverse connections with local and distant communities alike—moving beyond traditional notions of what a museum can or should be.
Immersive Experience, Subtly Refined
The design echoes O’Keeffe’s modernist, refined sensibility with minimal ornamentation and a neutral color palette, allowing her artwork to come to the fore. Throughout the site, we incorporated subtle animations to add moments of delight. We integrated the site with IIIF, the web’s leading standard for image delivery, to facilitate a deep zoom viewer for each work from O’Keeffe’s collection, enabling visitors to see the detail and dimensionality of O’Keeffe’s brushstrokes more closely than if they were at the museum in person. Content authors are able to select colors for backgrounds and title cards to complement the artwork, ensuring each page remains cohesive and harmonious as the featured art changed over time.
Storytelling opportunities are woven throughout the site to highlight Georgia O’Keeffe’s story, perspective, and identity, expanding the view of the icon’s legacy and relationship to her work. On each page, bold quote treatments are used to feature O’Keeffe’s own words. A reimagined blog features recordings of past museum talks and the work of museum curators, archivists, and educators. Pages documenting the history and inspiration of the artist help the audience embrace the full truth of her experiences. Through these features, we encourage introspection, discussion, and growth, leading to persuasive calls to action for events or educational resources. It all comes together to distinguish the museum as so much more than a gallery or a tribute.
Easy to Use, Accessible to All
As with all our projects, we were mindful to keep our WordPress-based build accessible, responsive, and performant; however, for the O’Keeffe Museum, ease of use, WCAG 2.1AA compliance, and technology that mimics a real-world experience are especially mission-critical.
For museum staff we created a backend experience that considered the functional needs of everyone including content managers, event producers, membership managers, and product leads.
Descriptive elements throughout the site ensure a seamless experience for users with vision impairment or low vision using screen-reader technology. The design was coded using semantic HTML which clearly and intuitively defines the content of each element. Dropdowns, tabbable features, and other interactive elements are similarly coded with ARIA labels to assist screen-reader users in navigating the site and consuming content. The global search form is seamlessly integrated into the main navigation, which can both be navigated via keyboard and screen reader.
Intuitive Online Store
To support the museum’s business goals, we developed a new, modern, easy-to-use online store experience. The store’s main page promotes the latest items and features an improved browsing experience with intuitive filters, enabling visitors to find items based on their interest. Meanwhile, backend code syncs the store with the Museum’s inventory management system to confirm whether an item is in stock. To maximize the capabilities of the store, integrations allow it to seamlessly handle a range of transactions beyond simply shopping including membership, donations, booking tours, and event ticketing.
See Our Work in Action
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