Weekly Critique: Whitney Museum of American Art
By: Jiyoung Lee
Tags: Pratt Institute, Visual Interface, Information Architecture, Website Design, Museums

Weekly Critique: Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art is one of the prominent museums featuring American contemporary art. As a student majoring in Museums and Digital Culture, I picked the Whitney Museum of Art for today’s weekly critique to see how museums visualize their content differently compared to other organizations or businesses. I adopted Cooper’s principles of design for this writing.

Clear hierarchy

The menu text, the most important element, is larger and thicker than other text. Black text and white background provide a great contrast on the website and they are strongly highlighted. Whitney’s website simply displays the main word ‘Whitney” and menus which are the center content of the museum in the thickest letter on the header. Other institutions usually indicate the full name of their institution (because it looks like it should be!), but on the Whiteny’s website, the full name was placed on the top right and displayed largely in the middle of the header image to emphasize the museum’s brand, and the menus easily catch viewer’s eye.

On the other hand, the fact that less important elements are not indented and repeatable could have been better than this since Copper stated that less important elements should be smaller, or indented.

A Grid System / Logical path

The content of the website is divided horizontally by a thin black straight line. Viewers can easily see the content while scrolling down. The contents are simply and intuitively divided, so it feels like you are looking at a magazine.

According to Copper’s design principle, interfaces that don’t employ symmetry tend to look unbalanced. So, ideally, the vertical and horizontal should be divided into a grid of constant proportions. The website is balanced in a diagonal symmetry in each box but overall, the horizontal ratio of each grid is different. The pattern of letters or arrangements is constant and so the spacing of each image is the same. The flow was not complicated due to the precise pattern and straight alignment of the square images, but if the menu was fixed, it would have been easier for the user to accomplish the task. Users must keep scrolling up to see the menu.

FORM VERSUS FUNCTION

In fact, the text has both obvious advantages and disadvantages. The black angular font goes well with the design of the website and color contrast is great. However, the spacing is so narrow that it would be difficult to learn at a glance for non-native English speakers. It is a part of wondering what the designer thought was more important than ‘readability’.

As a person who is following ‘’intuition’ and chooses the color to suit my clueless taste when composing websites or social media content, I was able to think about what the designer’s qualification and what information architecture means by studying various principles from The Essentials of Interaction Design. This book was published in 2007. and still, in 2020 it emphasizes the immutable principles of design.

Straight, square, black and white, and easy navigation.

These words are keywords that came to mind after about a minute of viewing the Whitney Museum website. The website partially fits with the use of visual properties emphasized in the principles of Visual Interface Design. According to Cooper’s design rule, the Whitney website didn’t employ an atomic grid unit in horizontal and vertical symmetrical order, flow was not really logically well done, and text spacing was not adequate. However, I think it was effective in conveying information visually, at the very least. As Cooper said, “good visual interfaces, like any good visual design, are visually efficient.”

In this case, is the Whitney website a well-designed website? Or is it a website that needs to be modified? Can I just simply call it a ‘unique’ website? Certainly, the Whitney Museum of Art’s website was an enjoyable example of a website that conveys information interestingly with a sense of minimalism.