King Tut Membership microsite for the
Art Gallery of Ontario
The AGO had a lot riding on King Tut in 2010. The museum reopened to great fanfare the year before, but the recession hit hard and revenue targets were proving hard to hit. A 1979 Tut exhibition had sparked “Tutmania” throughout Canada and brought more than 750,000 visitors to the AGO; the museum hoped the sequel would prove a comparable blockbuster.
We knew Tut would bring the Gallery to the attention of a huge number of people that were not normally museum-goers. The Development department was determined to seize this unique opportunity to convert them to museum members. Expectations were also high among existing customers, who expected to reap the benefits of their membership. Our team created this collection of pages to communicate with both audiences.
Working in-house at the AGO, I received a packet of info that was, in a way, a brain-dump. Written by my colleagues in Development, it was packed with information they knew we needed to convey. It contained a pitch to prospective customers, as well as information specific to members at various levels, and a run-down of a time-ticking procedure that was unusual for the Gallery. The first thing I did was comb through the text, grouping like-with-like and eliminating redundancies. I followed this with a design that applied the AGO’s King Tut identity in a layout that maximized the visual interest of otherwise dense information. Once the scheme was accepted and approved, I put it together using HTML/CSS and our ModX-based CMS.
It was an enjoyable project, executed smoothly, and I was glad to contribute towards an objective that meant so much to the museum.
Posted June 2010