Two nice art gallery websites

The past week was the first annual New York Gallery Week, and while going through the list of participating galleries on the website, it occurred to me that web design should be a pretty important thing for art galleries.  You don't want to do the artists you represent a disservice by showing samples of their work on a crappy-looking and difficult to navigate website.  Or even a boring website.  A stylish and attractive website could make a potential buyer more inclined to actually visit the gallery.  And a creative website that shows outside the box thinking can set a tone for the gallery and the kinds of artists it represents.  Of course, one might say who cares what the website looks like as long as the artwork looks good.  The problem is, the artwork is being shown in the context of the website, and why would you shoot yourself in the foot by pairing good art with bad design?

So here are two art gallery websites that caught my eye:

Participant Inc.  What I like about Participant's site is the band that goes across the website and reveals text superimposed on the homepage's photograph as you scroll up and down.  I like the concept of hiding and revealing at the same time.  It's a little clumsy as is, and the left-justified screen makes the site seem unbalanced, but it's a very interesting concept.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash.  The photographs of the gallery space that make up the background to the website are what make Mitchell-Innes & Nash's website stand out.  Instead of using white or some other color as the background, they use the background space of the website as an opportunity to showcase the physical space of the gallery, making the viewer feel connected to that space.  The site was designed using exhibit-E, a partner company of Dan Miller Design that focuses specifically on web design for art galleries.  (Dan Miller Design and exhibit-E have pretty awesome websites too.)  Fittingly, exhibit-E has written a book entitled The Art World and the World Wide Web.  Obviously, people have been thinking about web design as it relates to art galleries long before I did.

 

Good news for web designers--more typography available

As reported in the L.A. Times today, several large collections of typefaces will soon be made available online, giving web designers more typography tools to work with.  Web designers have long felt restricted by the typeface choices they've had to work with.  But readers who are used to the beauty and diversity of typefaces in print have also found reading on the web to be grating and jarring. 

It seems to me, at least, that many websites and blogging platforms have placed an emphasis on ease of producing and publishing content, rather than on ease of reading and consuming content.  The two need to go hand in hand, engineers and designers need to be working together.  But people who specialize in design ecology are becoming a hot commodity, so it seems things are changing for the better as more people are giving thought to user experiences.