26 November 2013

This Design Museum’s Website Lets You Browse Its Collection By Color





Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City is devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design, with an extensive collection spanning 30 centuries.



With renovations under way till 2014, the museum rolled out a beta version of its website that allows visitors a more creative way of browsing its online collection.



To add to its eight existing browsing categories that includes ‘Types’, ‘Periods’, ‘Exhibitions’ and ‘Countries’, there is now ‘Colors’.



“The interactive website design was inspired by the site of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in that at first glimpse each item appears in close-up rather than in its entirety, an approach that encourages people to start with details to discover works of art and design, rather than zooming in after the fact,” reads an article on Slate.



Each image in the catalog has five representative colors attached to it, color averages picked up by ‘robotic eye machines’. Users need only peruse a grid of 117 colors derived from the CSS3 palette and naming conventions, click on a color, and be led to a list of artworks that overlap with the selected color.



Users can click on one of the five color swatches attached to each image to continue their color searching adventure on the website. Start exploring here.















[via Slate and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum ]