Government Art Collection

Finding new user routes into existing content through stories

The Collection and it's artworks contain an abundance of stories, and this concept was used to present unusual and inspirational routes into discovering content. A number of compelling long-form Stories were created, then categorised and tagged for easy filtering. An individual Story can be composed from text, images, sound and video elements.

Designing for uncertainty

Presenting large amounts of artworks on screen within Collection index views posed an obvious challenge, in that user searches would return mixed sets of artworks of different dimensions and aspect ratios. Rather than try to shoehorn artworks into a strict grid, we opted for a more freeform masonry style layout for when numerous items would be on screen, and adapted the number of columns in the interface so collected artworks could be viewed comfortably on any device.

Dealing with high information density

Screens displaying single artworks posed another challenge, in that large amounts of information needed to be made available to the user, but ideally on an optional basis, so imagery could remain the focus.

An accordion UI element was used to fold away additional detail until required, and thumbnails were shown to indicate when alternate images were available. A zoom feature enabled both mouse and touch activated close-up viewing of works, and full-screen overlays were also made available for distraction free viewing, as in this example.