Texas Performing Arts
Texas Performing Arts asked us to design a website to showcase their collection of historic movie backdrops. This was a fun website to design because of the very intrinsic categories and search concepts they required.
This was the original home page when we launched the site. The photo was a placeholder while they created a video, but it also works as a fallback if the video cannot load. Also to note, since the site was launched, TPA has redesigned their logo, so all of the work shown here will have the old logo.
The below images show how the lead designer and I began to work through laying out the home page. Although there is a lot of information on the collection subpages, the main navigation was quite simple and didn’t require any dropdown menus. So we decided to have each of the four pages in the main navigation have a photo and a brief description on the home page, which a link out.
Below is an example of one of the backdrop pages. This one pretty well encapsulates the variety of items we had to think through for user experience with this design.
Movies in the collection had a range of backdrops, at minimum one up to twenty. The client also wanted to include high-res detail shots with each backdrop. We were able to agree on five detail shots, so as not to overwhelm the user. You can see them below the main backdrop image, navigatable either by the ‘prev’ and ‘next’ arrows or by clicking on the photos themselves.
For navigating between the backdrops, we settled on the small grey rectangular icons, with the icon turning gold to signify which backdrop you’re currently viewing.
The client also wanted a lot of detailed information for each backdrop and we needed a way to display it all succinctly and clearly. It was a priority for our client that users be able to search by these categories.
Overall, this was an interesting website to plan and design. A lot of little pieces of content that we had to figure out how to sort and display.