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Twelve days ago the Walker Art Center launched their new website and the response from the cultural community has been nothing but positive. Their approach was to ignore the static standard exhibition and collection focused approach that has in the past only served to highlight the disconnect between curatorial, education and communication departments - that designers have tried to cover up with pomp and flashy graphics. 

Instead the Walker has took a more strategic look at content creation and the experience of users who may or may not be visiting the galleries but who still desire “an experience of art”. In redesigning/developing their new site, the Walker is not presenting new content as much as presenting a intuitive and logical interface for discovery. By claiming their identity as center, the Walker’s new site collects and even features cultural content created elsewhere along side the myriad of blogs they’ve been publishing since 2005 on the subjects of community, new media, design, visual art, performance, and film. The genius of this approach is not the accumulation itself, but the interface for approaching it. Everything is related and each string you pull from the Walker’s ball of yarn leads you down a different path. 

Exploring www.walkerart.org is an experience of a new millenium’s attention-span at work. Designed for the maximum use of the ‘Open In a New Tab’ key command, their is nothing linear about the flow of content. Image heavy but not reliant, as a first-time user, it feels as though the directions one could travel are limitless and that no matter which one chooses to follow, three more options will emerge.  While the traditional navigation bar keeps us grounded on the top of the page, to the left a covert navigation ”eye” tool helps us the dive into the site by filtering by genre the content one sees, while a ribbon on the righthand let’s us know without reading what exactly we’re looking at. This site feels less about looking at works of art (something the internet is inherently bad at) but rather the ideas and context that is shaping the conversation around works and making.