Iaphet Elli  |
| Image: Jen Wang |
(NEW YORK, NY—April 21, 2016)— The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation launched an updated Guggenheim.org
today, with a new user experience and design that places artwork at
center stage, facilitates easy navigation of visitor information, and
encourages engagement with the Guggenheim’s global, educational, and
curatorial programs. The relaunch maximizes users’ interaction with art
and ideas preserving the institution’s visual and conceptual heritage.
“The Guggenheim reaches nearly six times the number
of visitors through our website than in our New York museum,” said Laura
Kleger, Director, Interactive. “A visit to today’s Guggenheim can take a
number of forms—from walking through our Frank Lloyd Wright building to
exploring our Collection Online. We reconceived the website’s user
experience, providing new avenues to enhance visits to our physical
space and actively engage digital visitors. A fresh visual design, a
streamlined architecture, and added content discovery mechanisms work in
tandem to promote encounters with the art, ideas, and culture at the
core of the Guggenheim’s mission.”
Showcasing artwork and responding to audience trends were core strategies of the redesign. To draw users into the Guggenheim’s Collection Online,
one of the most visited areas of the site, a randomized selection of
artworks from the museum’s collection appear at the bottom of every
page. Streamlined navigation gives visitors more access to the
Guggenheim’s archive of audio, photographs, texts, and videos. This
archive includes curatorial research, artist interviews, exhibition
tours, performance highlights, and discussions about art, architecture,
and society. Encouraging content discovery, related items of interest
are surfaced across the site—whether a video profile of Brazilian artist
Erika Verzutti, a 1978 radio discussion about a Mark Rothko
retrospective, or digitized telegrams from Frank Lloyd Wright during the
planning of the museum. With the new architecture of the content
management system (CMS), the audio player offers uninterrupted
background listening as a visitor navigates throughout the site—a
feature developed in response to the dramatic increase in consumption of
the Guggenheim’s audio content since 2013. The new site is fully mobile
friendly, with responsive layouts created for smartphones and tablets,
as well as future screen sizes, allowing the digital audience to access
information on their device of choice.
The new Guggenheim.org also enriches a visit to the
museum by providing simplified and streamlined navigation and easier
access to exhibition, educational, and visitor information. A “Now in
New York” feature, accessible on every page, allows users to find
information about the day’s exhibitions, events, and museum schedule.
With one click, it displays museum hours based on the current day and
time in New York. Bringing together the Guggenheim’s global activities,
the websites for the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection are effortlessly accessed through footer links to information
for visitors and details about programs. Visitors are now able to
explore art, curatorial research, and global initiatives across the
Guggenheim’s distinctive constellation of museums and beyond.
The refreshed design reflects both the Guggenheim’s
classic and avant-garde sensibilities, with a nod to the Guggenheim’s
existing identity (developed by the design firm Pentagram). A new
digital color palette includes a range of grays and blacks with two
accent colors, allowing the artworks to be the prominent focus of every
page. The typography combines Galaxie Copernicus and Verlag, the latter
of which is the font family that was originally dubbed “Guggenheim” and
made to reflect Frank Lloyd Wright’s lettering on the museum’s exterior.
In addition to the user-facing improvements, the website’s
infrastructure has been modernized and simplified, specifically designed
to adapt to future advancements and embrace new digital
opportunities. The objectives and process of the redesign, as well as
details about the site’s features and enhancements, are detailed on the Guggenheim’s blog.
About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation
of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, through
exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications.
The Guggenheim network that began in the 1970s when the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, was joined by the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice, has since expanded to include the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao (opened 1997) and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (currently in
development). Looking to the future, the Guggenheim Foundation continues
to forge international collaborations that take contemporary art,
architecture, and design beyond the walls of the museum, including with
the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, and with The Robert H. N.
Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. More information about the
foundation can be found at guggenheim.org.
