Past Work
Here’s a collection of six previous pieces of work that relate to my thesis project. A brief overview of each work is presented on this page with Development Directive PDFs with full process narrative and work linked.
Work Sample Three:
Prototyping and Web Design: Rothko Chapel
The Rothko Chapel is a non-denominational chapel is Houston, Texas, founded by art dealers and philanthropists, John and Dominique de Menil. It houses important works of Modern art by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. It serves as a place for interdisciplinary religious events, and as a meditative and contemplative space for spiritual retreat.
The website serves as a way to inform people of coming events at the chapel. It serves as visitor information, provides history of the site, and information on the de Menil art collection. It also is key to the collection of donations, access to the Board of Directors, set-up for volunteering, and provides other key information.
Process: The website needs to showcase the art and architecture of the Modern American masters that contributed to its construction (particularly Rothko and Newman). The website needs to clearly and cleanly give a historical backdrop to the Rothko Chapel, and how the art was procured and placed. It needs to use an easy to use top page drop-down menu-bar to clean up the navigation, and to bucket separate key usages for specific users. It needs to better utilize slideshows for imagery, and make media size, resolution, and placement on the page more consistent. To showcase the art on site, possibly incorporate new media, (AR, 360 cameras) to allow better access into the space. Separate the content of the site into well defined areas on the website. Provide a quick-access event calendar, testimonials, historical pages, links to the de Menil collection of art, overview of the Oscar Romero award and it’s previous winners, etc. The website also must make donations easier, possibly offer an Online store, and a portal to make volunteering easier to assign and coordinate.
How This Relates to My Work:
Building the Rothko Chapel website helped me to understanding the tools for web and app design like Axure and XD. It also helped me learing more about coding, Java, HTML, and plugin applications. This is all tools that I can use to building my apps and customizing my algorithms and work on my thesis website. It also taought me how to properly do UX testing and build a comprehensive IA Document for shareholders and designs to use. This will translate well to the Art Bible of my thesis project. Furthermore, the themes of the Rothko Chapel, and how it integrates Modernist art into a meditative space helped me shape my ideas of my levels for my thesis project.