Unveiling an online masterpiece for Dulwich Picture Gallery
02/10/2008 - London
The Daily Telegraph called it ‘The most beautiful small gallery in the world.’ The New York Times said that it is ‘One of the glories of Europe’. And now Dulwich Picture Gallery has a stunning new website by Reading Room, which showcases everything the gallery has to offer.
These two newspaper quotes are revealing as they also show the strategic approach that we took with the gallery’s new online presence. We realised that it is a local gallery which is highly involved with its local community. But it is also far more than that – it’s also a genuinely world class institution with an innovative vision for the future. So we decided to take an approach that would both reflect the gallery’s local commitment and brand them online as a global gallery to be mentioned in the same breath as the Tate, Guggenheim and Louvre.
The new site – www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk – is visually impressive, which is vital in establishing the gallery as a powerful online brand. It uses a navigation that feels as though you’re peeling back layers of the gallery using a range of their ‘heritage colours’. This starts with a short video of the outside of the gallery on the homepage which helps to stress the local identity of the gallery. The peeling layers show the full range of activities that the gallery does – rather than just displaying pictures. This includes activities such as school education and community outreach; running competitions and venue hire.
Dulwich Picture Gallery was the first gallery space built specifically for the public in 1811. They have a fabulous collection of art that includes paintings from Rembrandt, Poussin and Van Dyck. The site is integrated with the gallery’s collection management system, KE Emu which means that all these pictures are easily searchable and can all be viewed as high res images. The gallery’s new site gives them an online presence to match their impressive collection and their innovative approach to running the gallery. And already, within a few weeks of launching, there has been a significant increase in traffic to the site.
Margaret Manning, CEO of Reading Room, said:
‘We have loved working with Dulwich on their new site, which I think looks stunning. It’s given us the chance to develop a creative vision to match a collection full of staggering works.’
Antonia Coonan, Head of Operations at Dulwich Picture Gallery said:
‘We were impressed with the way that Reading Room managed to combine excellent technical abilities with a strategic and creative vision that matched what we wanted to project – a major gallery on the world stage with an innovative vision for the future.’
