Aspen Art Museum

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Aspen artist
Aspen artwork
Aspen art museum the blue of distance (20160930)
Aspen art museum search (20160930)

The new website for the Aspen Art Museum, a museum of contemporary art, coincides with the opening of its new building by Shigeru Ban featuring a woven wooden facade, and the development in house at the museum of a new visual identity featuring custom fonts by the typographer Radim Peško.

The site is organized as a database of “everything”, a growing archival grid of all artists and events that have passed through the museum.

On other pages, such as the “About” and “Visit” pages, the site uses our highly flexible content management system, Economy, allowing the museum’s designers to reconfigure these pages and to invent new pages as new needs arise.

The site is designed to look as great on phones as it does on desktop, a goal which is reinforced by the design’s emphasis on “the now” and on the natural environment. Our thought experiment was that a user should be able to physically see the new building from the nearby ski lift, check what exhibitions are on view on a phone, and walk straight in from the bottom of the lift.

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The website uses a different font weight each season, so that it appears robust in the spring and summer, emaciated in the winter. This attitude towards nature is echoed by the “windy” logo at the top of the page (a way to show all four fonts at once), and by generous and irregular (but systematic) use of whitespace in the layouts, in balance with the grids of the “everything” database pages. Yellow is always used to highlight today’s events, which lends the site’s palette a natural, paper-like feel. A verbal message at the top of the homepage (for example, “the museum will open at 10am”) further emphasizes the present and presence.
Year: 2014  Client: Aspen Art Museum
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