Initially interested in how and why tastes in art are formed – and the process of reflecting upon your own tastes in art as an individual. Are art sensibilities passed down generationally? How do your tastes in art diverge from that of family and friends?

• Idea to have user react to random pieces of art based on emotion
• Data visualization showing emotional reaction to different pieces of art / artistic themes
• Initially included fine art, music, and video

Before the coding process, I created several prototypes in Adobe XD to work from. Here are my notes from the process:

Idea for user fill out form outlining their demographic in order to relate that to their tastes in art.

Idea for users to cycle through randomly generated pieces of art (from museum APIs) and select their emotional reaction from four different options.

• This was too broad and held little measurable meaning.
• I wanted to combine measurable, objective data on taste in art with subjectivity and personal reflection

Settled on a “quiz” with three steps, which would result in a personalized output for the user reflecting upon their objective as well assumed tastes in art.

1. Select Favorite
2. Rank artwork in order of personal enjoyment
3. Classify artwork by emotional reaction

Hope is to inspire the user to reflect upon their own tastes in art and compare them with people in their life.

Initial development was spent on creating:

• Drag and drop functionality
• Click image to expand to overlay for closer look
• User flow of website
• Positional styling

1. Broke down hierarchical structure of quiz into 6 major art movements and subsequent subgenres
2. Chose 10 pieces within each major movement that evenly spanned across its respective subgenres
3. Chose “cover image” for each genre in the first step of the quiz in which the user must choose their favorite piece out of 5 artworks
4. Created JSON file with data (artist, title, year, genre, imagery/subject etc.) and Boolean attributes for each artwork (ex. Human = true, nature = false) – [this data is incorporated into the final quiz output]

• Wrote a paragraph corresponding to different genre / emotional combinations for each major art movement making assumptions about the user – this would go into “feeling” output
• Created chart listing objective preferences (eg. Humans in nature, religious imagery, etc.)
• Extracted colors from user's favorite pieces to create personal, fluxtuating “aura" and suggest colors they might like
• Listed favorite pieces from their quiz to encourage research

This is a moodboard I created when brainstorming the initial design of the site. Much of my inspiration for my first design iteration lied in early computer-art, and a blue & black color palette.

Reading from top-left to bottom-right, the images are:

• Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton, Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I), 1967 [the most widely circulated early artwork made using a computer]
• My own glyph/logo created for use across my websites
• A computer artwork I created using Processing & Java for a creative coding course
• Windows wallpaper created by Susan Kare, the designer of the first Mac icons as well as late 1990s windows icons.
• Early windows screensaver by Susan Kare.
• Cover art for John Coltrane’s 1958 album Blue Train, designed by Reid Miles.

From my first design brief:

My website design will be minimal and brutalist, with the intention of keeping the emphasis on user interaction with art. My background colors will be white, black, or brown, and my type will be green, red, black, or white. Navigation will be simple and straightforward, and art will be centered and own most of the viewport.

Since images are the driving user experience in this site, I wanted the aesthetics of the site to blend seamlessly into background and not change the user's perceptions of each image -- the user experience IS the aesthetic.

My first working draft of the website used blue Monospaced text against a black background, inline with my "early internet" and brutalist inspirations. I hoped to give the feeling of a terminal / console interface. However, as I shared the design with my peers, I realized that the color pallette was too harsh, and compromised readability.

I decided to keep the minimal page layout and Monospaced font, and change the colors to an easily readable pallette with dark text against a light background.

I chose a soft tan background [#d9d7cc] and monospaced font [Inconsolata] for my final design.

The background color provides a less jarring alternative to white, preventing any clashing with the images in question. The monospaced font is easily readable and retains a minimal, brutalist feeling given its "default" nature.

I created this site as a way to inspire a shift away from academic conceptions of art for the user. I've often had friends tell me that they feel as if they can't enjoy a museum because they are not formally educated in art history -- this is a shame, as the enjoyment of art ultimately lies in personal subjectivity.

By interacting with art pieces without context or labels, the user is able to simply enjoy the images at face value. By doing this, I hoped the user would reflect upon their personal taste and identify places of emotional resonance [specifically in the emotion part of the quiz]. At the end of the experience, I provided the user with subjective results [suggestions towards why the user felt how they did about their chosen art, and a shifting colorful 'aura'] and objective results [artists, titles, dates, and subject matter]. Ultimately, I hoped this would encourage the user to feel less intimidated about forming opinions and emotions on art, and that all thought on art is equally valuable, academic or not.