Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design | Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design | Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

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This collection is home for more than 160,000 works of art from the Renaissance to the present concerning the history of European and American art and design. It includes works on paper featuring designs for architecture, decorative arts, gardens, interiors, ornament, jewelry, theater, textiles, graphic and industrial design, and fine arts.

The digital objects are listed for browsing and show thumbnails and titles. There is no search function so the user must click through the pages of images to find what they’re looking for. After choosing an image, the user can click on the image and view it one size larger. There is no zoom capability and the images, though very interesting, are small.

The metadata consists of the title, description, time period, creator, actual image size, the materials used to create the art, where it was purchased, where it was made, and the provenance. The metadata is good, but it would be nice if links were provided to art of the same type (architectural drawings, etc) so that they user could easily find more of the same.

The audience according to the Cooper-Hewitt website is designers, scholars, writers, and collectors. Anyone simply interested in design would enjoy the collection too, as well as any other collection part of the Cooper-Hewitt.

Though there is no denying the images are interesting, their digital representations leave something to be desired. They are small and do not zoom or enlarge enough to be truly appreciated. The site isn’t searchable and there are no links to the art by category of types of design. This seems to be a site based on getting people interested in viewing the physical exhibits in person. Something else to be noted is the word BETA just above the list of links to the site’s collections and this could be why the site isn’t quite up to par. Lastly, curatorial departments of the museum are closed until further notice due to renovations.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing this post, I read this post its really a good idea to get more traffic for your site as there is no any search function in this digital objects so the user must click through the page to find what they are looking for. However it’s very interesting.

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