Revealing the full scope of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

The University of Oregon’s art museum first opened its doors to the public in 1933. Based in Eugene, Oregon, this museum was designed to house the Murray Warner Collection of oriental artworks.

By 2023, the museum was in desperate need of a new website. Their old Drupal site was reaching the end of its supported life, and they wanted a site that better showcased their mission and diverse communities of visitors. The new website showcases the museum and its artwork to give visitors a sense of who JSMA is and their collections right from the homepage. The project involved extensive consultation with stakeholders representing the university academics, visiting public, and students, to ensure the necessary content was displayed on the site and easily located.

View the project

Evolving the brand to digital

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art publishes many art books, a magazine, and numerous publications for supporters along with their annual report. They had a rich library of beautiful images that demonstrated the breadth of their collections and the diversity of their community and a strong print brand that we wanted to embrace in digital. We poured over their print work to bring the brand design into the digital realm.

Image: Some of the print materials used as inspiration for the design of the website.

A selection of images from different print resources created by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, including member magazine, monographs and more

A new user-friendly approach to Drupal

The new website needed to be Drupal 10 with the ability to easily update to Drupal 11 which was near release. In addition to the Drupal requirements of the University of Oregon, it was also the CMS that their web team was the most familiar with… and with our new approach to the editor interface, the user-experience became more intuitive for more staff to contribute. Gutenberg isn’t just for WordPress… it can now be utilised in a more limited capacity with headless systems and in Drupal.

A screenshot of a page being edited in the JSMA’s new website - in this editor a rich media page follows the appearance of the page being updated. A side panel shows settings that editors can use. — Editing on Drupal is now versatile, providing visual options and the ability to create dynamic editorial layouts.

In this screenshot of a page being edited on the JSMA site, a panel of pre-made content components is shown alongside typical editing tools - the editor can pick the pattern that suits their needs. — Editing on Drupal is now versatile, providing visual options and the ability to create dynamic editorial layouts.

Bringing the galleries to a wider audience

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art has numerous galleries with permanent and rotating collections and exhibitions held within their historical building. Through the design and development, the museum is now able to showcase their artworks dynamically throughout the website.

Feeds can be dynamically inserted into content layouts and refined to pull in content based on date (is it on view), relevancy, etc.

Exhibitions about to end or upcoming exhibitions are clearly identified to visitors.

Relevant or related content (events, articles, press releases) from across the site are automatically shown on exhibition listings.

A range of exhibition “page templates” are ready to use, allowing the first impression of an exhibition to honour the intention and aspect ratio of the works.

A Galleries page allows visitors to learn more about the gallery spaces and see what is currently on exhibition and explore past exhibitions.

A long full screen captured from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The Art section page is composed from a series of visually rich panels promoting the exhibits and activities of the museum.

Building for the future

Their diverse stakeholders needed to be showcased on the site, and the navigation also needed to direct their different audiences to these areas, as the museum undertakes both public and academic work. We created functionality for creating content hierarchy, custom URLs mapping, and easily-edited menus that can evolve with the museum’s needs.

The website needed to be able to grow over the coming years to meet their needs, such as expanding their online collection. Plans are still to come for developing a full online collections portal that will be integrated with the new website, though this is subject to funding. We created a collections content type that serves as an exploratory tool for learning more about the diverse collections and showcasing featured works from each collection, with the ability to visit the current online collection url.

Other aspects we put in place included a custom events management system and robust forms that support everything from tour requests to event registration.

In Summary

The new website, now on Drupal 11, is modern and engaging while still being representative of a serious art museum based at a university. The staff are able to manage everything except the hosting themselves, and went through a multi-step training to ensure they were up to date with the new CMS. Improved search and implementing SEO means that the site is easily found through search engines, and that visitors can easily find the content they need.