Experiencing Art Online
Fall Facelift №2
Welcome to part two of our Fall Facelift series — a peek behind the curtain of our design process at Trivium Art History. Every summer we prep for the U.S. school season with visual and content updates, and this year we’re focusing on design. So let’s talk about experiencing art.
I love visiting museums, no surprise there. In particular I love seeing artwork in person that I’ve seen in books or online — the physical presence of texture and scale are always a shock. It’s a wholly different experience to line yourself up to a massive canvas by David, to be engulfed by it. But the museum experience is exclusive, and limited. Unless you live in one of the world’s super cities or casually travel internationally, your access to the world’s art is limited. And even within the walls of the National Gallery or the Prado, you only see a slice of the totality of art history.
Trivium has been sharing history’s artwork online since 2011, and we’ve always struggled with the simulacra nature of our work. We can’t show you art—only pictures of it. Thanks to the incredible documentation efforts by collections like the MET and The British Museum, and by organizations like Google Arts & Culture, we often have beautiful, high-resolution images to showcase. But screens are small and zooming is awkward. So how can we create an online experience that gives even a small hint of the feeling of standing in front of a masterpiece?
Let’s talk for a moment about analytics. Like most platforms, we’ve instrumented the major interactions on Trivium, and delight in watching the little numbers go up and down. I’ve implemented an aggressive test-and-remove strategy, where low-usage interactions are redesigned, and if usage doesn’t increase, the feature is removed. I particularly like to cut any feature that was difficult to build. Complex code is often a sign that your design is bad.
One of Trivium’s first features was an image zoom. It was a stripped down implementation of Timmy Willison’s panzoom.js — serviceable and relatively simple. I always hated that zoom. It was always just a bit laggy, a bit herky-jerky. But month after month, the zoom feature was the most popular interaction on the site. So I didn’t fix what wasn’t broke. Then, a realization:
People were zooming because our images were too damn small.
This is what our artwork pages looked like. A clean, precise overview with plenty of room to support portrait or landscape orientations, and negative space you could take a bath in. It’s playing by the rules—visual overview of the artwork, primary meta data above the fold, click to zoom, scroll for details. In the art history world, this is how it’s done.
All these sites are eminently usable, but if you want to really see the artwork, you gotta zoom. I stumbled on the solution almost by accident. While updating our mobile styles, I set the images to fill the browser window. It felt immediately different—dissonant, overwhelming. Suddenly I was immersed in the detail of the artwork. Textures and nuance emerged that’d I’d never been able to register at our dainty previous size. And my interaction changed. I had to scroll to see the entire artwork. It took time, forced me to slow down.
The analytics told us our users wanted to get up close and personal with the artwork, why make them click for it?
It’s important to point out that Trivium has a luxury that many of the sites above don’t. Our exclusive goal is to allow people to discover and experience art. We’re not a commerce platform like Artsy, and we don’t carry the expectations of a massive organization like the MET. Blowing up the artwork images feels like a strangely aggressive move. It adds tension to the experience, and not every platform can lean into that. But for Trivium, it works.
So why stop there?
To balance out our massive images, we needed an overview—a quiet moment to follow this dramatic engagement. And people might want to know the name of the artwork, right? And so I looked back to the museum experience. Scale is at the core of our experience with an art object. From David’s looming canvases to squinting at the famously tiny Mona Lisa, an artwork’s size can’t be reproduced in the browser, but it can be hinted at.
Time for some math. I wanted to place a scale human model next to our artwork overview. A content audit revealed that 92% of the artwork we host on Trivium have a declared height in cm—definitely enough data density to support the feature. Then I created a human silhouette, aiming for ambiguous race and gender, at the global average height of 180cm (5ft 9in), scaled it relative to the in-browser height of the artwork, and positioned its eye-level at the curatorially favored midpoint of the artwork. For small artwork the human silhouette was swapped out with a silhouette of a hand, to maintain the universality of the comparison.
The result surprised me.
Adding the silhouette completely changed my understanding of the artwork. It turns out that Emperor Pius’s aquiline nose is life-sized. Our silhouetted friend can be dwarfed by Joan Mitchell’s abstract expressionist quadriptych, and with our empathy alight, we feel a bit smaller ourselves.
It will always be a challenge to share a physical experience with art online. But it’s worth trying. We’ll keep experimenting, keep it human, and keep leaning into the dissonance.
