The Museum of Contemporary Art unveiled a new website Wednesday with stark black-and-white design and aggressively whimsical lettering, provoking the type of strong reaction modern art intends.
Basecamp CEO Jason Fried tweeted that he found the new site a likable, “organized mess,” while other commenters simply found it … a mess.
The site design reflects a new visual identity inspired by the building’s grid-based architecture.
Susan Chun, the MCA’s chief content officer, said studio Mevis & Van Duersen created a design that features a literal grid to tie the website to the physical place. The grid varies in tightness to give the visitor visual cues to how deep into the site they are, Chun said.
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She described the design as “provocative” and “smart.”
Chun said she was also concerned about making the site accessible to the visually impaired and worked with Sina Bahram, an accessibility consultant, to ensure the site featured high contrast, white-on-black design as well as detailed image descriptions for programs that read text aloud.
The MCA designed an open source platform called Coyote that creates a process for museum staff to submit, edit and approve the site’s image descriptions, Chun said. She said the museum is sharing the platform — and the museum’s findings related to it — with institutions in the U.S. and France.
“There are so many complicated decisions to make about how you describe something,” Chun said. She said many “tricky questions” arise, such as whether to assume the viewer has prior knowledge of a given topic, or whether it is always necessary to indicate a person’s race.
Some on social media questioned whether the design in fact hurt the site’s ease of reading. Chun said Bahram and the museum worked with a “large group of international testers” who did not take issue with it.
She admits some might find the design downright ugly. So what about the risk that it turns visitors off?
“There’s also the potential to bore people to death. We would rather provoke a reaction and be in a conversation,” Chun said. “Love it or hate it, you’ll understand we’re trying to do something that is interesting.”
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