> Art Archive Website
Lookback
An art-archive demo site for a fictional institution, Aura Art Center — built to spotlight historical figures and records that time has scattered.
- Stage
- Shipped
- Skills
- Next.jsArchive UXMotion & InteractionVisual Identity
Field notes
Built solo end to end — planning, design, and development — as a working demo of an art-archive site, using public-domain images from PICRYL. What the archive holds varies wildly: oil paintings, sketches, black-and-white portraits, faded old posters, spanning different eras and image quality. The challenge was binding that mismatched material into one site without flattening what makes each piece feel the way it does. I handled everything from the IA to the main hero's staging to the responsive build.
Process
The current spotlighted work sits large in the center, with the next works in line fanned out behind it as slightly overlapping cards. A dark info card overlaid at the bottom-left carries the artist, year, dimensions, and medium.
I wanted to recreate, on screen, the feeling of a spotlight hitting one piece in a gallery while the next one waits just visible in the dark. The backdrop is the current work's own image, blown up and blurred — not a fixed background color, so it shifts with every work and drops you into that specific piece's mood each time.
