Art Institute of Chicago

Enterprise level Drupal 7 CMS implementation delivers beautiful redesign of museum's website + mobile version

The Art Institute, founded in 1879, now has approximately 300,000 works of art in its permanent collection, stewarded by eleven curatorial departments and nearly 500 employees. This collection is housed in eight buildings—nearly one million square feet—at the heart of Chicago, one block from Lake Michigan and serving as the eastern anchor of the city's downtown. In addition to displaying the permanent collection, AIC hosts 30 special exhibitions and hundreds of gallery talks, lectures, performances, and events every year.

Project Goals

  • Design and implement a mobile optimized website
  • Migrate the existing site to Drupal 7 from Serena Collage
  • Develop an improved information architecture and site map for the desktop site
  • Create enhanced calendar functionality

Results

  • Redesigned Drupal 7 site with mobile theme
  • Redesigned home page
  • Custom calendar
  • Custom "toolkit" navigation

The custom toolkit navigation allows AIC to promote additional content so that it is easy to find in this large content heavy site; for example, Events, Exhibitions, Membership Events, Hours of Operation based upon date, Dining options.

The redesigned home page allows AIC to promote up to six features, such as Exhibitions and Events, contains full-bleed image that scales to browser window size on desktop site, and allows promotion of video.

Core to the redesign/build was a mobile theme. The mobile site leverages the look and feel of the desktop design and is optimized for smaller mobile devices with a specific, prioritized subset of overall site content such as featured exhibitions, calendar, todays hours, collections, dining, and more.

Being a museum site there is the need to have a lot of large images, therefore it was neccesary to optimize the Drupal 7 website build and customize certain modules for best performance for desktop and mobile versions so that content could be delivered quickly and easily.  Fuse IQ worked with AIC to configure an installation of Drupal 7 that meets and exceeds these requirements.

Visual strategy and design by Studio Blue, a Chicago-based Fuse IQ partner.

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