Vero Beach Museum of Art: Viewpoints

The VBMA Viewpoints site for the Vero Beach Museum of Art was intended to make learning about art accessible, relevant, interesting, and fun for students, educators, and life-long learners.

Our challenge with this project was to create a variety of ways for users to explore four outdoor sculptures virtually and to build an online community around them.

While the Viewpoints site was intended as a standalone, it needed to complement the existing VBMA website, so we pulled some of the same color palette into this website. Warm orange and yellow is tempered by cool aqua and periwinkle to echo the tropical colors surrounding these outdoor works of art. In keeping with this contemporary art museum's focus, the website design was clean and modern.

Each of the artworks included four main sections: Inform, Explore, Create, and Classroom. Inform presented photo galleries and multimedia resources for each of the artworks, including artist's biographies. Users could also view the sculpture in 360 degrees—an important part of understanding these in-the-round artworks.

The Explore section superimposes points of interest on an image of the artwork. When users click on each dot, they are given more information about key features—original paint colors, videos of the artwork in motion, conservation concerns.

Create allows users to make their own versions of these artworks—they can make a horse sculpture out of found objects (like Deborah Butterfield's Saltbox), manipulate issues of positive and negative space (and change the colors and physical settings) of Haydn Davies's Trevan's Arch, write your own dialogue to the allegorical work of Tom Otterness's Trial Scene, and manipulate the mechanics and geometry of George Rickey's kinetic art, Annular Eclipse VII. Once users have made their own art they can save it, download it, share it on Facebook, or email it.  Artwork submitted to the Museum may be included in the Viewpoint user-generated artwork album.

Classroom, like the Participate section shared by all four sculptures, provides resources for teachers and those generally interested in discussing and sharing information about art appreciation and education.

The Explore and Create sections of the website are built in Flash and the entire site runs on a Drupal 6 content management system.

Vero Beach Museum of Art, 2010