Our Client

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis brings together three units — Art, Architecture, and Museum — forming an interdisciplinary and diverse community of artists, architects, and designers. This unique structure allows the School to build on the strengths of each unit and to draw on the resources of the University to provide an unparalleled educational environment that promotes innovation and collaboration.

What They Needed

The School needed a new unified site that would replace four separate sites; reflect a new identity and the collaborative nature of the community; showcase the work of students, faculty, and alumni; and promote the exhibitions and renowned collection of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The site needed to be easy to maintain, allowing the School to connect individuals on campus and create a tool to reach out to prospective students as well as maintain contact with alumni and parents.

How We Helped

Working in collaboration with design partner Studio Blue, who created the school’s identity system, Palantir developed an innovative extra-wide page layout that allows for the simultaneous presentation of institutional and inspirational content and represents the continuity and interdisciplinary nature of the school’s curriculum. The left side of the page features information such as course, faculty, campus, and gallery information. The right side showcases rotating news items about the school and featured photography, keeping visitors better connected to the institution and its communities. Visitors can easily move between the different sides of the page by using two large navigational arrows at the top of the site that provide a “click to slide” effect.

The Museum side of the site allows visitors to browse the institution’s collection, which features works from artists as diverse as George Caleb Bingham, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse. Visitors can also view current, upcoming, and past exhibitions.

The site’s headers and other custom typographic elements are displayed using the sIFR font replacement technique, allowing them to be easily edited within the site’s content management system and display consistently across different browsers. With such a sophisticated front-end, it was important that the site’s back-end be flexible and robust enough to allow Sam Fox administrators to easily update content without worrying about whether doing so would interfere with the site’s design. Palantir used the open source Drupal content management platform, which was not only able to handle the site’s design and layout with ease, but also provide additional tools to simultaneously update and maintain content for both the School and the Museum.

When the news side of the site is expanded it reveals a sophisticated system to sort archived news items. Headlines of the most recent articles are displayed near the top. From there, we leveraged Drupal’s taxonomy capabilities so that news items can be sorted by their topic (Academics, Conferences, Research, etc.). In addition, news items are archived by the semester they are published, a feature accomplished by using the Palantir-developed Views Date Range module.

The School site’s Portfolios section, which features work from faculty, students, and alumni, is built using a custom content type combined with the Palantir-developed Views Cycle module. This module allows administrators to create a thumbnail grid of images. We then supplemented Views Cycle with a jQuery plugin that generates a ‘cycling’ effect as new images are selected from the grid. Finally, the Views Attach module was used to bind these image galleries to the portfolio pages.

Making the Museum’s vast collection accessible to site visitors was a priority. All of Kemper’s collections data is maintained through MuseumPlus, a desktop collections database. Palantir worked with MuseumPlus to define its MySQL database so it could then be transferred to a Drupal environment. Using Drupal’s inherent flexibility, Palantir was able to configure the Kemper site so that all the collection data can be pushed from MuseumPlus into Drupal’s database and then displayed using the Views module.

Given the symbiotic relationship between the Sam Fox School and the Kemper Art Museum it was only natural that from time to time the two sites would need to share content. Palantir was able to provide this functionality by using the Domain Access module. Now, with just the click of a check box, site administrators have the ability to designate content for two separate domains within a unified backend system.

The Upshot

The Sam Fox School website now conveys the energy and collaborative spirit that can be found on campus. All of the elements that comprise the School and Museum are brought together in one dynamic online experience.