Illuminating Design Virtual Exhibit
Knowledge, the brightest light of all.
Illuminating Design explores how design and technology allowed Edward F. Caldwell and Company to stay competitive in a booming industry of lights and electricity. This website provides an emotional exhibit experience by bringing visitors virtually within the walls of the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum during a global pandemic.
Challenge
The DAR Museum showcases multiple innovative art exhibits each year, containing insights into amazing historical stories. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the DAR pivoted to bring their new exhibit to life online.
Solution
New Target worked collaboratively with DAR staff to create an insightful digital experience that replicated the planned immersive physical experience.
Strategy
Our goal was to create an immersive digital experience across devices. We wanted to recreate the feelings that visitors would normally experience when they walk into a museum and mirror the physical dimensions with user journeys and user flows.
Part of the excitement of a museum is the sense of discovery and being able to truly engage with the pieces in the exhibits. The challenge in an online environment is to recreate this experience as closely as possible.
Website Design & Creative Vision
As you enter the Museum’s virtual exhibit, you’re greeted by a melody of ticking, timeworn clocks and the warm embrace of softly-dimmed, yellow Edison lights.
The exhibit is showcased in large, open halls filled with interesting stories. Dark curtains and cream walls highlight the artwork and historical pieces that brought electrification and light to the country.
We designed the website to recreate a similar experience, with a frictionless information architecture, contrasting warm and bright colors, all the while with the historical photography and artwork front and center.
Moving from one web page to the next is like wandering the halls of their historic houses, smooth and scenic.
Development & Hosting
The website uses Drupal to manage content and provides a familiar framework for the DAR team. Given the website’s use of high-res images, our team took care to ensure that the website loaded quickly without losing image quality. As a result, the site achieved an A+ in GTmetrix.
For smaller devices, we did not just resize but re-engineered all features and calls to action (CTAs) to be within a thumb’s length away.
Our hosting and development teams work seamlessly and integrate continuously during all our website projects. Having hosting engineers on staff whose sole focus is the environment in which the software lives is a benefit of our integrated full-service digital agency beyond those focused on design alone. We’re providing modern hosting architecture for DAR within New Target’s cloud to provide industry-leading load times and performance in support of the overall member experience.
How we did it.
The cornerstone of your identity is an authentic brand story. We work with you to establish a clearly defined brand strategy for your goals – a strategy complementary to your brand’s visual voice.
The creative we design is heavily influenced by the framework for innovation. We design media not just to please our clients, but to engage and delight their customers, members, or constituents. We put people first.
We’ll help you select the right technology, and code it right. Our development team is passionate about using the right mix of open source, off-the-shelf, and hosted solutions to solve complex problems.
We understand clients have a choice of website hosting providers. Our service goes beyond stability, up time, and more to a personalized approach that meets you where you are today, and prepares you for your tomorrow
From search engine marketing strategies to social management to campaign activations and monitoring, we create bespoke digital marketing strategies for your audience.
