MCA Denver sought to create a digital experience that is a direct extension of their unique, vibrant identity as a custodian of creative life in Denver, Colorado.
Located in the heart of LoDo, Denver, the museum promotes creative expression, risk-taking, and experimentation through rotating exhibitions and innovative community events. Its exhibitions feature a broad range of work from regional, national and international artists. Its adult and teen programs are refreshingly thought provoking – and a ton of fun.
MCA instinctively understood the power of design as a vehicle for driving their brand. They championed design at every step of the way, and gladly sweat the details throughout the process. The goal was to create a website that goes beyond talking about the museum and truly extends the MCA Denver experience directly through your laptop, tablet or phone.
About the project
MCA Denver needed a website that was on-brand – dynamic, plugged in, even quirky – without sacrificing usability. The experience had to be simple, clear and delightfully intuitive. We mapped navigation and wireframed key screens early in the process, building a skeleton architecture that was simple and open, giving ample room for MCA's vibrant imagery and rich storytelling.
Events are at the heart of MCA Denver. Supporting a workflow for easily creating and managing events and RSVPs was critical. We chose to support MCA's existing Eventbrite workflow by building a seamless integration that just works. When events are published in Eventbrite, they are automatically queued for import into the MCA website along with links to RSVP or buy tickets. No new systems to learn; no hassle.
Why Drupal was chosen
Combining a modular design system, adaptive content structure and simple page-building functionality, helped to develop the capability for rich storytelling with the museum’s content. From exhibitions and events to highly configurable landing pages, the platform provides easy-to-use functionality for building screens that are dynamic and uniquely purposed.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
The Field Group module allows site-builders to group fields by relevance to one another. In the case of MCA, we used Field Group to organize fields on node edit pages to make an intuitive authoring experience for their content managers.
The modifier “responsive” in “responsive web design” is redundant today: all web design should be responsive. One issue this raises is the need for multiple image styles to be placed on the page — a hero image that is one size and aspect ratio on desktop is entirely another when displayed on mobile. Drupal core handles image styles poorly for the responsive use case, for example cutting off a subject’s head when resizing an image. Focal Point gave control to our content editors to set the most important part of the image so the image displays appropriately in whatever size viewport the user is engaging.
An extremely powerful module, this has little to do with “paragraphs” as most of us understand that word. Instead, this module puts layout control in the hands of an authorized content editor inside the authoring experience, rather than in the arcane and complex interfaces provided by the Panels and Context modules.
Coupled with a theme override provided by a dedicated custom module, Aten used this module as the basis of a “Landing Page” feature that allows authors to build website landing pages that include text, images, embedded video, custom blocks and Views in the content of the page. It allows editors to create robust, content-rich web pages.
The Media Entity module allows content editors to embed multimedia throughout their site. We used this module on MCA along with a host of related modules — for video, audio, document uploads, images, as well as embeds from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud — to empower editors to create rich experiences for their users.
We used this module on MCA in conjunction with the Paragraphs module to make an extremely vibrant and whimsical user experience that mirrors the experience of visiting the museum itself.
