Joan Mitchell Foundation

When we began working with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, their website failed to match the purpose and intent that they applied to all other facets of their work. A dated and stagnant user interface no longer reflected their audience’s needs and interests, and an inflexible content management system prohibited the staff from making necessary updates to the website. They needed a new strategy, structure, and design that enabled the Foundation’s digital presence to act as a true extension of their work.

One major goal was to restructure the website to intuitively surface content for key audience members. We conducted navigational studies that revealed how curators, scholars, and Mitchell enthusiasts explore the archives and how to simplify grant eligibility and program details for artists. We also partnered with content strategist, Carrie Hane of Tanzen Consulting, who produced an in-depth, guiding content model. This all led to a boldly reduced navigation, well-organized landing pages, and clean index pages that support information retrieval and encourage deeper exploration.

After determining site structure and page layouts, we established design principles, which are succinct guiding phrases that set a unique and intentional direction for the design process. Our design principles inspired a clean aesthetic that uses white space as a tool to draw attention to meaningful content. Core colors compliment Joan Mitchell’s artwork and soft neutrals add warmth to the page. The design also supports large, expandable images to be able to see artwork in more detail, and photography focuses on people to reflect the Foundation's commitment to supporting and amplifying the artist community.

We delivered a highly-performant website backed by an intuitive publishing experience built on Craft CMS. Expanding on the earlier content modeling exercises, we customized the authoring experience to suit the Foundation’s precise needs. Features like a modularized page-builder system allow staff to create unique pages with reorderable and customizable modules, striking just the right balance between structure and flexibility. The CMS also offers greater capacity for cross-linking content across the site, providing an interconnected and exploratory experience for site visitors while still maintaining an intentional design system.