REMOTE: Reflection (Spacing and Layout)

My latest gallery, REMOTE, has been live for a few weeks and it's now a good time to look back at it critically. I want to take a fairly in-depth look at; spacing and layout, navigation, design, information and overall experience, so I will analyse each area in its own blog post. Starting with...

Spacing and Layout

I have an ideological idea as to how a virtual exhibition should function. I try and stick to these ideas (rules, if you like) as much as I can. However, for these larger projects, I have to make some quite large compromises and they start to look like some VR galleries I have been quite critical about in the past. This is mainly about the number of works on display and the space attributed to each of them and this is why it forms the first part of my reflection.

There are over 200 artworks in this exhibition and they are spread between rooms on a course-by-course basis. I designed the space to be expandable, so I could add new spaces as I needed them or new work appeared (new works kept appearing right up to the day before it went live!). However, every new room adds another two jump-points (or links) for the visitor to navigate, and previous data has shown me that every click of the mouse equals about a 50% reduction in visitors. So I had to keep the number of rooms (or jump-points from the entrance) to a minimum - which meant that each one had to hold more work.

I think I got the ratio of work to space to links about right for the size and type of the exhibition, but I don't have to be happy about it. It does feel a little bit too crowded. The frames do a fairly good job of creating space and protecting the context of individual works, but they have been arbitrarily distributed without much thought given for the appropriateness of them... but I did use my experience and went with what felt right without too much analysis as to why. I am not entirely certain that these frames work in the same way as traditional frames. Are they just a design gesture? Perhaps they are not needed in a traditional sense.

Different styles of framing have been used to differentiate between works. Successful?

A fairly successful device that I did use to differentiate different artworks, throughout the exhibition was size. Again I chose sizes intuitively and whilst some exhibitors may not be very happy about it, feels right (to me).

No frames in here. But the different sizes (successfully?) differentiate between different artists.

The layout of work in this exhibition has been fairly successful, but not ideal. It may be that I am never going to be able to reconcile the amount of work exhibited against the number of galleries and user experience. So in light of the size of the project, this area has worked out relatively well.

My next blog post will analyse the navigation and architectural layout of the gallery.

If you are reading this blog and feel you can add something to my research then please comment… even if you are correcting me or don’t agree with something that I say.