Arts & Culture
Woodmere Art Museum: The Violet Oakley Experience
Website Design & Development
Woodmere Art Museum has a collection of more than 8,000 works of art by Philadelphian artists, offering exhibitions and programs that serve adults and children. The strength of this collection includes the largest collection of American artist Violet Oakley (1874-1961).
Encouraging Exploration
In 2018, Woodmere received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to catalog and present the life work of Violet Oakley. As part of the grant, Woodmere engaged Lyquix to design and develop a digital resource center—The Violet Oakley Experience.
The Lyquix team and Woodmere staff started the project with a rigorous audit of the Violet Oakley inventory. Together, we set out to organize the expansive and interwoven collection of Violet Oakley’s art into digestible parts for users to explore.
The goal of the Violet Oakley Experience was to present all of Oakley’s work in a way that would serve all audiences—from academics to the general public. We wanted users of the Violet Oakley Experience to quickly understand the vast scope and diversity of Oakley’s career and, if desired, perform a deep dive into Violet Oakley’s life and work.
Project Goals
- Establish Woodmere as the definitive resource for information on Violet Oakley
- Provide all audiences, from academics to the general public, an intuitive digital experience that allows for discovery and exploration of Violet Oakley’s life and works of art
- Increase awareness about the Woodmere Art Museum
Building a Flexible System
Woodmere Art Museum owns the largest collection of Violet Oakley’s drawings and paintings, spanning her long and versatile career. Organizing all of her work—3,000 works of art—into an engaging and intuitive experience for users required careful planning, creativity, and technical expertise. The creation of a three-tiered system of organization enabled us to reduce most of the site down to three main page templates: categories, commissions, and objects.
Page templates were designed and developed to dynamically adjust to variations in content. This included a banner system that could handle anywhere from 4-8 images or videos, in multiple proportions, all without any image processing. We also built in horizontal scrolling for content areas that could host anywhere from 3 to 20 commissions or objects.
Results
Since its launch, the Violet Oakley Experience has exceeded expectations—appealing to art professionals, academics and the general public alike. Two articles in the local press praised the presentation saying that the Woodmere Violet Oakley Experience, “...offer[s] an engaging digital archive of the museum’s extensive collection of works by Oakley...It is elegantly designed and... offers clear headings and stunning images to enable visitors to investigate the full range of Oakley’s works.”
Project Results
- Creation of a new online experience
- Completely responsive across all screen sizes
- Intuitive organization of 3,000 works of art
