:: audience
artdish visitors are composed of artists, gallery professionals, museum curators, journalists, students and individuals in the Puget Sound region who are particularly interested in visual art exhibited and created in the Northwest.
:: challenges
In general, many individuals in this core audience use Macintosh computers, have ISP accounts with AOL, use legacy browsers like early versions of Netscape, and have moderate modem speeds with dial-up service accounts. Considering this criteria, artdish was tailored to be cross-platform for both Macintosh / Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer / Netscape Communicator users. The site also needed to load fast in consideration of users with slower connection speeds.
:: online branding
Before the site was produced, artdish existed only in name and in concept. A branding idea was sparked by site's name and purpose. Coffee cup logos are everywhere, but not one logo included a coffee cup with a pine cone. The brand invoked both the concept of artdish as a "virtual cafe," where visitors could read articles and share thoughts on the discussion board, and to emphasize two images associated with the Pacific Northwest: coffee and conifer trees. The brand also projected a sense of play, which the client enjoyed, highlighting the site's central theme about creativity and soliciting comment.
:: user interface design
Initially, the client proposed that the user interface design should be "messy" in the sense that art and making art is about clutter, brainstorming, getting dirty hands, and so forth. However, the site's function is really about exchanging thoughts and comments in an open forum, and to read monthly articles about visual art.
The emphasis here is on text-based content, not images; although artists' works are regularly featured. As such, the user interface design projects a clean and simplistic style — required for easy reading, and the monochromatic color palette in gray tones serve as a neutral background for colorful scanned reproductions of art.
:: VIEW SCREEN SHOTS
