Eisterhold Associates, Inc.
Eisterhold Associates, Inc. is a design firm specializing in the planning and design of museums and interpretive experiences for civic institutions and private organizations. Their specialty is interactive, spatial storytelling in immersive environments.
Our goal was to highlight their company and expansive portfolio in a simple but visually immersive way.
The Challenge
Eisterhold’s website wasn’t adequately showcasing their business or brand.
The design of the website looked antiquated. Pictures were small. The structure of the pages limited the content that could be included. And new, visually impressive work was difficult to find.
Our goal for this project was to place their portfolio front and center—while making their company information accessible and easy to engage with.
Putting the work front and center
Work samples are the most popular content—by a large margin—for professional services firms like Eisterhold Associates.
More importantly, Eisterhold Associates have a long history of completing prestige projects that speak for themselves.
So we stripped the homepage down to its most essential element: a carousel of projects that fills the entire screen.
Reflecting Museum Design in Website Design
We took inspiration from the immersive environments Eisterhold creates for museums and brought that experience to website visitors through museum conventions, interaction, and an immersive experience.
Convention
The format for image descriptions was inspired by the standardized look of museum exhibit labels—the information displayed next to artwork and artifacts.
A painting and its label at the DeYoung Museum. Photo courtesy of Image Transfers.
A photo and description from The President’s House project on the Eisterhold website.
Interaction
Interactive museum exhibits engage audiences by making the experience active, rather than passive.
While websites are inherently interactive, content-based websites can also feel static.
To add life to the site—and giving a nod to interactive museum design—animations were added to every image on the site, such as a CSS scale animation on the Projects page.
An Immersive Experience
To further enhance the focus on Eisterhold’s body of work, we wanted to visually distinguish the project pages from the rest of the site.
We chose a black background for this purpose. Similar to the concept behind a black box theater or a black cube art museum, we chose black for its ability to make images pop off the screen. It disappears into the background, leaving the viewer with only one point of focus: the work.
Even sections of pages with a white background use black to feature a list of work projects, creating a consistent visual presentation for projects.
Telling the story of museum design, from concept to completion
Museums are successful not just because they present facts, but because they tell a compelling story.
The story we wanted to tell was how these projects were created. We wanted to take viewers through the design thinking behind the projects.
To accomplish this we selected photo assets in the client's collection that allowed us to show the museum design process:
Illustrations & computer renderings
Exhibit construction
Audio & visual production
These process artifacts culminate with images of the complete museum experience.
Impact
For any service business, potential customers are always looking to answer the question “do you do what I need done”. The new Eisterhold website answers this question quickly and effectively by:
Leading with the work, which demonstrates better than anything else what Eisterhold Associates, Inc. is capable of
Providing a streamlined site navigate with a corresponding easy-to-understand site architecture, which shows attention toward the needs of the people interacting with the website (echoing the needs of museum visitors)
Presenting the work in a modern website that uses up-to-date web technologies, which shows that Eisterhold is comfortable with technology
All of these things come together in a website that echoes the creativity and professionalism found in Eisterhold’s museum design work.
Services Provided
Squarespace website design & build
Information architecture development
Web brand standards development
Copywriting
Image selection