Background

Since the summer of 2015, Range has been the Birmingham Museum of Art’s web agency partner. The Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) houses a diverse collection of more than 26,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative arts dating from ancient to modern times. Their mission is to provide an unparalleled cultural and educational experience to a diverse community by collecting, presenting, interpreting, and preserving works of art of the highest quality.

We partner with BMA’s team as their digital development arm to execute various technological projects, maintain their site and expand their online collections.

Ongoing Site Maintenance and Improvements

Besides hosting, upgrades, and regular maintenance, we work with BMA to execute various micro-projects on their site each year. These include freshening up event pages and updating calendar functions. We also worked with their team to execute the “Adopt an Artwork” initiative where we designed and developed a micro-project intended to fund and raise awareness for art restoration. The BMA relies on us to execute their ever growing list of site needs and we’re happy to be there for them.

Revamped Collections

Up until recently, BMA’s collection was only partially online and missing key metadata. To fix this, BMA tapped us to integrate Piction and WordPress for a seamless collection experience. Piction is a digital media warehouse that can manage all types of digital content including images, video, audio, and documents. One of Piction’s strengths is its ability to maintain a variety of metadata and flags associated with each media item. This means we can now set many search parameters to see any work of art that is flagged for online display.

When designing the new collections display, we kept high fidelity images of pieces in mind (possible via Piction!). To really allow users to explore these images, we incorporated a zoom feature where you can see the piece in high-definition. Check it out yourself

SmART Guide

Coinciding with BMA’s contemporary collection exhibition opening (Third Space) we designed and developed a Smart Guide that users can leverage to learn more about artworks on display. 

You can read more about the Smart Guide and how we developed it alongside BMA in this post.

Continued Partnership

We really enjoy and value the creative and technological partnership we have with BMA. We look forward to working with them to continually improve their digital presence and to measurably increase user engagement with art through technology. Go visit the museum!

Sara Cannon is a UX/UI Designer, Former Business Owner, Creative Director, & Artist remote working in Birmingham, Alabama. 
Have a project I could help you with? Contact me at sara@saracannon.com.