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05.02.08
webpick of the week
Art/Creative, Branding
Discovering Design is a destination for individuals to learn about the evolution and history of mid-century American modernism—the people, products, places and ideas that formed an important design era. The target audience is broad and ranges from the architecture and design communities to students and potential customers of Herman Miller furniture.
Originally the site carried the message of the Herman Miller "Get Real" campaign that encouraged people to appreciate authentic furniture design among an industry filled with imitators. However, through an ever-growing set of content and features, the site has outlived the campaign. Now it’s an engaging visual index supported by synopses and profile "nodes" of individual designers, products, places and ideas.
The site’s become a mini online museum of modern design; interestingly its key assets create the most difficult maintenance task: finding images and licensing content. Most are provided by the Herman Miller Archives, but the developer’s also been pleasantly surprised by the donations of imagery and information from the estates and foundations of the designers.
Notwithstanding the brilliant content, the navigation and cross-linking on this site are noteworthy. It opens with a scalable main index page that's less about maintaining a hierarchy of content and more about encouraging exploration. A carousel connection (like a Rolodex turned on its side) provides a fun, functional vehicle for showing the depth and breadth of the content at a glance. For each content node, related links and connection lines provide a means to explore the connections between people, places, ideas and products. Once a node is selected, a breadcrumb of those previously visited is aggregated at the top of the page and related links and nodes are indicated at the bottom.
• The site took approximately three months to build, but has been kept fresh with multiple updates over a four year period. A recent redesign in 2007 resulted in the scalable carousel index and breadcrumb features.
• The site is essentially a single Flash movie, with individual Flash
modules for the audio and video player(s). Individual subdirectories
are maintained for media including text, images, audio and video.
• There are currently 71 profile nodes and approximately 300 images. Future updates will include the addition of audio and video assets (currently there is only one full-length interview with Charles and Ray Eames (with seven to ten more audio and video clips planned).
www.peopledesign.com