Tang Teaching Museum launches new website
Skidmore's Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery has launched a new, robust website that features immersive images, clear navigation, and a versatile design to bring new attention to the exhibitions, events, and educational programming that make the Tang a leader in the museum world.
"Our new website offers visitors a much richer online experience, whether they're quickly checking our hours or plunging into our trove of digital images and videos," said Dayton Director Ian Berry. "The Tang staff and our design partners, Linked by Air, have created something truly unique, a site that extends the Tang's mission to a global audience through a deep archive of the great work we do everyday."
In addition to providing details of current, past, and upcoming exhibitions and events, the new website tailors information for college students, faculty, K-12 teachers and students, and libraries in an extensive Education section. Also, in a dynamic, interactive feature, those interested in museum work can visit the Staff page, hovering over staff members' job titles, and read about the responsibilities for that position.
"The Tang’s new website is a dynamic and living environment, like the Tang itself," said Dan Michaelson, partner at the New York City design firm Linked by Air. "It’s very focused on people—users, students, staff, artists. But one of my favorite features is the pattern in the background, which always corresponds to the current wind speed and direction at the Tang, as well as the number of webpages viewed on the site by everyone so far each day. The pattern is always changing and growing throughout each day, a great metaphor for the Tang as an intellectual crossroads."
Other new features of note include an easy-to-use events calendar, a growing Collections showcase, and a Publications section that features Tang's exhibition catalogs, which also continue the Tang's mission beyond the walls of the museum.
New York City-based graphic design studio Linked by Air specializes in the production of public spaces and other networked structures, both online and in the world. The site is an application of the highly agile and fun-to-use content management system, Economy, based on the open-source framework Ruby on Rails.
