Yale School of Art
art.yale.eduA constantly changing website reflecting the vitality of Yale’s art school.
- A fully editable website used daily by students, faculty, and staff
- A modular system that shaped how designers think about flexible digital identity
- A platform that evolves each year through community use and experimentation
- Recognition across the design field, from awards to critical debate
- Concept, design, and development of a custom wiki-based platform
- Creation of modular tools for visual and textual expression
- System architecture supporting 200+ simultaneous contributors
- Ongoing collaboration with the School of Art as the site expanded and evolved
Our goal was to give the School of Art a website that would change every day, without requiring staff to manage it. An art school’s website should feel as alive as the school itself, attracting prospective students through its energy and giving current students, faculty, and staff a shared space for daily activity.
We built the site as an editable system open to all 200+ members of the community, with no training required and only a web browser. This custom wiki supports both visual and textual expression through a set of modular building blocks. These modules create a recognizable structure while allowing constant experimentation, variation, and subversion.
Now almost two decades old, the platform has become a long-running social experiment. Students have used it to share events, publicize work, register protest, plan exhibitions, and launch unofficial courses. It has been chaotic, inventive, and often brilliant, and it helped define how a generation of designers thought about modularity and flexible digital identity.
The site has received both praise and critique, from the AIGA “365” Award in 2007 to Vincent Flanders calling it “the year’s suckiest website” in 2010, to its appearance in Linked by Air’s Jury Award at the 2012 Brno Graphic Design Biennial.
