ICON NICHOLSON METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART · developing new business opportunities and e-business solutions across all Internet platforms and devices. Icon has 29 offices in 18 countries

iconmedialab.com metmuseum.org

ICON NICHOLSONIcon Nicholson is the New York office of Icon Medialab, a leader in

developing new business opportunities and e-business solutions across

all Internet platforms and devices. Icon has 29 offices in 18 countries.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ARTIn formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection in

New York contains more than 2 million works of art from all points of

the compass, from ancient through modern times.

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Gain: AIGA Journal of Design for the Network Economy | Volume 1, number1

Case study METAMORPHOSIS: metmuseum.org

http://www.iconmedialab.com

http://www.metmuseum.org

METAMORPHOSISCulture and commerce meet in the Metropolitan

Museum of Art’s digital museum without walls.

In “real” virtual space, where costly aspirations are pinned on a

set of flaming pixels and Internet surfers ruthlessly click from

one world to another, design can make the difference between

great success and total failure. A notable case in point is the

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest website (metmuseum.org),

created by the New York office of the global Internet services

firm Icon Nicholson. Launched in January 2000, the Met’s new

site was followed just one month later by a staggering 600 per-

cent increase in membership sales over January 1999—leading

to a substantial increase in revenue. The number of visitors to

the museum doubled the first three months postlaunch (com-

pared to the same period in 1999); the amount of time visitors

spend on the virtual site has also doubled since its debut.

by Stephen Nowlin

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The Metropolitan site is a well-oiled example of how to build a virtual information architecture today, one fully integrated with the identity, purpose and vision of the real-space institution it reflects—and more. It is becoming increasingly clear that sites on the Internet are more than just digital echoes of the organizations or corporations they represent, more than simple electronic versions of printed catalogues or annual reports. They are, rather, interactive experience-based destinations that not only market theirparent entities but also exist as independent entities them-selves. And design is a critical factor in their success. Preserving the past while delving into the future may seem like an impossible brief, but this was exactly the challenge that faced Icon Nicholson’s chief creative officer, Tom Nicholson, when he put together a team of Internet architects, art directors and engineers to work on the Metropolitan’s site makeover. The museum wanted to break new ground in online exploration and learning, expand its store’s retail sales and reach a larger audience. Of course, the latter motivation—increasing audience size—was what propelled the Web through its infancy back when busy corporate execs finally got so annoyed by the pestering of their precocious juniors that they agreed to budget for this new thing called a homepage. But the for-mer two elements of the Icon Nicholson assignment are more than just PR strategies to drive traffic through the physical museum’s front door. They are emblematic of thinking about websites as actual expansions of an

organization’s real estate—as “real” as adding another few hundred thousand square feet of bricks and mortar. While it is clear that a virtual museum visit will be likely to accomplish what advertising tends to do—increase walk-in traffic back in the solid world—it is also clear that a certain percentage who visit the Met online will complete their encounter with the museum right there. The design challenge, then, is to extend into cyber-space a whole experience—one that is not only inspired by the “real” thing, but is also self-sufficient. For a site the size of the Met’s, this becomes a challenge of complex pro-portions. Interpreting and translating all the graphic ele-ments tied to the institution’s identity became a major factor in developing an appropriate virtual extension to the museum. Countering the complications of dynamic navi-gation through large amounts of information demanded a robust and consistent architecture that took into account articulating and integrating content hierarchies and coding

for stability and scalability. The result is a site that pro-vides an easy, intuitive and seamless experience of many millennia of artistic endeavor. With hindsight, Icon Nicholson’s choices may appear self-evident—because it works so well, good design always seems that way. But in the beginning, the virtual Met was a quietly glowing blank screen. To fill it up with the right things, the Icon team began with a lot of research, identifying the site’s goals and which areas of the museum were to be included, as well as what each wished to accomplish. Next was the production of a site map and schematics displaying the information architecture, the ebb and flow of how visitors were to navigate through the site. PhotoShop screens based on the approved schematics and storyboards followed, and printed versions were then mounted on foam core and presented to each of the muse-um departments. After that stage, HTML limited-function prototypes—practice Web pages—were created so the client could get a feel for the real thing. Then came user-testing with Metropolitan members and focus groups, and finally the building of a fully operational site. For Icon Nicholson, the entire operation took approximately 16months, from research to launch. For the Metropolitan, launch came about two and a half years after its first request for proposals. Following an arduous 12 months of considering various approaches, the museum selected Icon Nicholson and named one of its own development staff, Terri Constant, as contact per-

son between the museum and designers. Constant now heads up the museum’s internal Web group, made up of nine full-time people who are responsible for keeping the site updated and responsive to various departments. This internal team includes an editor, business manager, image coordinator, designer, tech person and various assistants. Although the design of new phases and ongoing engineering are still the province of Icon Nicholson, much of the site content changes dynamically at the command of museum staff, who use custom tools devel-oped by the Icon team and by staff input into pre-existing data management programs now tied to the Web pages. The need to organize the virtual museum has affected communication in the physical museum—pushing later-ally against the inclination for older institutions to vertically isolate their departments. When pointing to metmuseum.org, the first thing you’ll see is a splash page—the “front cover,” as it were—

The design challenge was to extend into cyberspace a whole experience—one that is not only inspired by the “real” thing, but is also self-sufficient.

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DATABASE DESIGNS

When the Metropolitan Museum decided to create a comprehensive digital experience of the institution and the 2.2 million objects in itspossession, one of its main objectives was to provide the online visitor with as much appropriate content as possible. Icon Nicholson was able to successfully integrate the museum’s existing legacy databases into online galleries that enable the viewer to simulate—and in some instances, exceed—the bricks-and-mortar experience. As an example, the curatorial information that appears next to each of the site’s 4,500 works of art (see above) originates from a legacy system called TMS (“The Museum System”), a backend data-base created for the Metropolitan by Gallery Systems. The curatorial staff uses TMS to record what’s called “tombstone data” (artist, title,

dimensions, etc.) as well as any research or scholarly notes of interest to be shared with their colleagues. Not only are online visitors able to access information about those images that interest them—thanks to an administrative tool suite designed by Icon that enables curators to pipe data into a staging area and finally to the site itself—they are also able to zoom in on details of the painting or object to more closely examine artistic hall-marks like brush strokes. If the viewer’s interest is particularly tweaked by an artist or topic, he or she is able to access a variety of research links via the site’s Educational Resources section—most notably Watsonline, the electronic catalogue of the museum’s esteemed Thomas J. Watson Library.

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CULTURE MEETS COMMERCE

CULTURE MEETS COMMERCECULTURE MEETS COMMERCE

There are approximately 2.2 million works of art in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—paint-ings, sculpture, furniture, artifacts and archaeological fragments. According to Lisa Waltuch, Icon Nicholson’s creative director for the Met’s website, the museum’s goal is to eventually map each object to a relevant and related purchase. This may sound ambitious, but it’s not so different from what actually happens in the bricks-and-mortar world, where the Met’s exhibitions feed into satellite stores that offer posters, slides and reproduc-tion artifacts keyed into what the visitors have just seen. People buy a lot in this context—not because they need the purchase or have always desired the object, but because it is a souvenir of the experience. This Disney model of desire works well on the Internet as well, as the Met can attest. Since its launch last January, the museum has increased its online sales by a considerable amount.

THIS IS HOW CULTURE MEETS COMMERCE IN THE VIRTUAL REALITY: You’re interested in fashion, so you decide to visit the Costume Institute section of the Metropolitan’s collection. While browsing a list of recent exhibi-tions, you see the name of Christian Dior, your favorite French designer. You click on the hyperlinked text.

1. You are brought to a page that has an image of one of Dior’s finest ball gowns. You read the text and notice that to the left there is a toolbar whose first icon is a shopping bag titled Related Store Items.” You won-der whether they have any reproduction Dior ball gowns, so you click on the icon.

2. You are simultaneously disap-pointed and relieved to see that the store does not, in fact, sell ball gowns. But there is a 208-page book on Christian Dior that features a beautiful dress on the cover. Good enough, you think, and buy it immediately. But wait—there are other things to purchase, things that relate to

your passion for fashion: books, jewelry, calendars, lexicons of couture classics. Even though you were unable to visit the museum site on Fifth Avenue, you now have souvenirs of a cultural experience.

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”

that establishes the site’s identity and purpose without hesi-tation. Color choices reflect the museum’s own scheme, and the Metropolitan “M” logo asserts itself as a site-wide link back to the homepage—a familiar beacon for recove-ring your bearings if you get lost. On this page and every other, a vignette image of the museum’s classical building appears in the upper left corner, anchoring the site to the rich texture of a Metropolitan visit. And, perhaps most significantly, a different work of art from the collection, with curatorial notes, is served up every day, summoned from a database that will not be exhausted until each of the permanent collection’s 2.2 million objects has had its turn. Here on the splash page and throughout the site are reminders that this is a repository of cultural history, and it is that history’s artifacts that drive the site’s—andthe museum’s—purpose and function. This ascendancy of the art object is constantly reinforced, and on almost every page there are paintings and sculpture, reminders of strolling through the museum where art is always dancing in the periphery. “We spent a lot of time walking around the museum looking at the colors, the walls, the galleries,” says Lisa Waltuch, Icon Nicholson’s creative director for the project. “We wanted to preserve the sophisticated and elegant feel of the Met online. This goal was a chal-lenge for a few reasons. The special feeling you get when you are at the Met is a sense of grandeur as you walk up the staircase off Fifth Avenue into the vaulted great hall. We wanted to interpret the feeling of the Met in an intimate online setting.” Unless you elect to do so sooner, the Met’s splash page automatically advances you to the homepage after about 40 seconds. This is where executive producer Marshall Curry, site designer Matt Berninger and lead engineer Jason Wurtzel set user expectations for the entire experience. Behind its links, the complex back-end pro-gramming of the site supports a series of upper-level navigation choices, each yielding a wealth of information with seeming effortlessness. Visitors going to the Collections section discover they can curate a personal exhibition of Met treasures, and display it in their own private area. They can search each department or see a map of where its galleries are located. Further along, they’ll get a listing of Met events related to that depart-ment, view affiliated items for purchase from the store or find links to additional resources. And this panoply of choices is repeated for all 21 of the departments listed in the Collections area. This abundance for the intellect

and eye is held together aesthetically by a Web browser idiosyncrasy that allows single pixels of color to be tiled throughout the background of a page. When two pixels of different hue or value are set next to each other and allowed to repeat all over the screen, just enough difference is achieved to give each of the various Collections depart-ments its own color identity—while at the same time unit-ing them through a subtlety of palette. Throughout the journey into this seemingly endless landscape of art, abundant user-friendly options appear. The macro-navigation is easy to comprehend and typo-graphically consistent everywhere, yet micro-contextual to each department. Clear, uncluttered page design offers textual links as well as a uniform set of logo-based icons that lead you to additional information networks. You can even pick an upcoming event from the calendar and elect to be reminded of it one day or one week prior, via personal e-mail. The human scale of Icon Nicholson’s solution is impressive, and is the result of a comprehensive program of identity design, content knowledge and creative technology. Web design, unlike print, does not come off the press in a final, unyielding form. It “launches,” a term implying the beginning of a process, not its finale. Websites are always expanding and contracting, morphing and adapting in time, and the technology enabling this elasticity is tricky at this point in its evolution—as much a limiting factor in design as it is a facilitator. Online broad-cast technology itself is changing and has yet to be fully standardized. Choosing a design team for a website is not only a matter of aesthetics, but also one of technological savvy. The aspirations of the Met site—to be an experience that offers a very personal online interaction with the virtual museum—requires solid page coding, creative server-side programming and content dynamically gen-erated from databases. The developers must not only know the technology as it is now, but also be able to anticipate future scalability and change. The future, to be sure, is notoriously difficult to contain—whether in the literal space of a museum or the virtual space of the Internet—so the Metropolitan site is bound to grow and change with technology and the evolv-ing needs of the institution. Second-rev features like virtual reality tours through the galleries and around objects, an illustrated timeline of art history and live webcasts of museum events will offer an ever-growing number of peo-ple the ability to appreciate the art of ages past—and even bring a little piece of it into the halls of their own personal museums, their homes.

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aiga.org sapient.com 7



Volume 1, number 1, 2000Gain: AIGA Journal of Design for the Network Economy is published two times a year by AIGA, 164 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010; 212 807 1990.

Editorial comments: [email protected]

Copyright 2000 American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Editor David R. BrownPublisher Richard GreféEditorial director Andrea CodringtonDesign Sapient

presented by

Author biography

Stephen Nowlin is a vice president at Art Center College of Design in

Pasadena, California, where he curates exhibitions of contemporary art

and is creative director for the college’s website, artcenter.edu.

AIGA Board of Directors

President Michael Bierut

Executive director Richard Grefé

Secretary/treasurer Beth Singer

Directors Bart Crosby, Marc English, Peter Girardi, Bill Grant, Eric Madsen, John Maeda, Clement Mok, Jennifer Morla, Emily Oberman, Mary Scott, Sam Shelton, Thomas Suiter and Petrula Vrontikis.

Presidents emeriti Lucille Tenazas and William Drenttel

http://www.aiga.org

http://www.sapient.com

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ICON NICHOLSON METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART · developing new business opportunities and e-business solutions across all Internet platforms and devices. Icon has 29 offices in 18 countries