A collection of collections

The students in my web design class are currently working on a project involving collec­tions. They have been tasked with gath­ering 10 – 15 objects or ideas that are mean­ingful in some way, and designing a website that presents the collec­tion to a larger audi­ence. As inspi­ra­tion for the design phase, and as a way of getting them thinking about how to tell the story of their collec­tion, I posted a few exam­ples on our course blog. I think they might be inter­esting for a wider audi­ence as well, so I’m reposting here.

A collec­tion of collections

Since we didn’t quite have time to go through these in class on Friday, I’ve collected a few of the exam­ples I was going to show here. Hopefully they give you some inspi­ra­tion as you think about orga­nizing and presenting your own collections!

Pictory
Pictory is a curated monthly collec­tion of photographs centered around a theme, along with their asso­ci­ated stories. They manage to make an incred­ibly basic struc­ture — all on one page, read verti­cally or using the left and right char­ac­ters to jump from story to story — and make it inter­esting using a strong typo­graphic grid and photographs. The level of cura­tion is also really apparent: each story and photo­graph is powerful on its own, but the order they’ve chosen for the overall collec­tion of photographs, emails, tweets, etc, has its own arc as well.

Sweet Gifs
Who doesn’t like animated gifs?! If you take the time to go through it, though, what appears to be simple is actu­ally a massive collec­tion. They’ve kept the presen­ta­tion in the spirit of an animated gif itself — linear, repet­i­tive, and with a good dose of ridicu­lous.

Lisa Congdon — A collec­tion a day
An example of orga­nizing and presenting a collec­tion (in this case many many collec­tions!) using the phys­ical qual­i­ties of its contents.

Andy Warhol — Time Capsule 21
Ignore for the moment that this is kind of a dated Flash app, and take a look at the field of over­lap­ping images that serves as the main “menu” to this collec­tion. Sometimes a collec­tion is inter­esting because of sheer volume alone, or because of the random­ness of its contents. There is no order you can put things in that makes sense, really, so giving visi­tors the ability to sift through the clutter visu­ally is an appro­priate choice.

Clip, Stamp, Fold
An exhi­bi­tion site done by the excel­lent folks at Project Projects, show­casing a collec­tion that is notable not only for its phys­ical qual­i­ties (different sizes, colors, propor­tions) but also for its evolu­tion through time. By using a time­line filled with thumb­nails that remain in propor­tion to their full-sized coun­ter­parts, you as the reader get two ways of accessing this collec­tion in one.

Mass MoCA — Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
If you haven’t made a trek out to the Berkshires to see this museum, and this collec­tion, I highly recom­mend it! (The LeWitt show in partic­ular will be installed for some­thing like the next 25 years, so you’ve got some time.) Like the previous example, this site gives its users multiple ways of engaging with a collec­tion — showing them all in a grid, and also locating them on a set of diagrams of the building itself.

This was also a nice example of choosing appro­priate supporting mate­rials: LeWitt left instruc­tions for these pieces as opposed to finished work, knowing that any museum that chose to “install” the piece would effec­tively create a completely unique visual form. Knowing this, including a time lapse of each piece as its made is a really nice choice.

PhilaPlace
A collec­tion of stories about in Philadelphia over the course of several centuries. Something we’ve all seen, I’m sure, but with the twist of drop­ping a very modern Google-style pin map on top of an historic map of the city.

MoMA — Bauhaus Retrospective
Pardon the second refer­ence to Flash, but this was also a nice example of orga­nizing and presenting more histor­ical information.

Miranda July — No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ok, so this isn’t tech­ni­cally a collec­tion. But I wanted to include it because it illus­trates so beau­ti­fully how simple a website can really be. Its one linear loop of pages, made solely using images and a “next” button, and yet it’s an incred­ibly effec­tive narrative.

Miranda July — Learning to Love You More
This site is hard to actu­ally read, so proceed with caution when using it as inspi­ra­tion graph­i­cally. But the premise of the site is inter­esting — it’s a collec­tion of “assign­ments” for other people to complete and respond with their results. An intan­gible collec­tion that elicits tangible feedback.

Michael Beirut’s The 100 Days Project in Design Observer
Not exactly related to what we’re working on in class, but an incred­ibly inter­esting article nonethe­less! Consider it a bonus.