Renai

Inspiration

— Access to viewing/learning more about high-quality artworks from the Renaissance period is limited online because most museum or 3rd-party educational websites are poorly designed and updated. There is currently not a single aggregated web platform that caters to the need of educating the mass public about the fundamentals principles of art and giving them the access of learning more/examining high-quality fine arts on the internet. Currently, only encyclopedias exist.

What it does

• Teaching the mass public about fundamentals of visual fine arts by organizing the plethora of rich but disorganized content online. We'd eventually want to expand the platform and allow visitors to practice the learned fundamental art technical concepts through guided photography exercises would allow users to understand these fundamentals (values/exposures, compositions, etc.) thorough real-life applications. We're choosing photography as a baseline because it's the most easily accessible.

This is how we went about organizing the information hierarchy:

— From the Renaissance to post-modernism (divided by time periods/style) — Era — iconic pieces — Artist —Techniques used

Here are some factors that we took into considerations in designing the information architecture

Decided that artist’s background isn’t necessary because there’s Wikipedia for that Should we organize by the artist foremost, and then style/era? Artists are the reason why there’s even these “styles/eras” so they should be prioritized. But each artist usually have a long enough career that it crosses multiple time periods their work evolves from one style to another since artists are not meant to be stagnant. How can we best organize styles/eras, by a filter system? But prioritizing which artists first get their content displayed is so subjective. To eliminate such biases as much as we can, we should organize by era

How we built it

Used the newly released API from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to access their art collection database.
Met’s API Used bootstrap for navigation Used Sketch for designing the UI interfaces Developed a cohesive UI Style kit (Open Sans and InterUI)

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we were a little too ambitious and we ended brainstorming into areas that we realize that we currently don't have the time frame and skill experience to execute.

Ended up not utilizing the museum’s API and manually selected a few well-known fine art pieces from the Renaissance to make it more relevant to people instead.

What we learned

Plan realistically

What's next for Renai

We wanted our platform to just focus on displaying art collections from a single museum - in this case the Met - and guide users through 1-3 exercises that would allow them to apply the concepts they’ve just learned from viewing high-quality visual arts from the tip of their iPhone

Built With

• css3
• html
• javascript
• metropolitan-museum-of-art-api