Cleveland Museum of Art

(

)

/ About the project

The Cleveland Museum of Art needed more than a new website. Its digital presence had grown into a fragmented ecosystem of platforms, content, collections, events, research, and visitor services that no longer felt like parts of the same institution.

We helped bring those experiences together into one coherent digital platform, designed around the different ways people engage with a museum: planning a visit, discovering exhibitions, exploring art, conducting research, becoming a member, or simply encountering the collection from anywhere in the world.

/ Credits

Client:

Cleveland Museum of Art

My Role:

Design Director / Product Designer

Services:

Product Strategy, Visual Design, Design System

/ Year

2025

/ PROBLEM

CMA's digital ecosystem was spread across five different subdomains, each with its own structure and visual language. Beyond creating an inconsistent experience, that fragmentation made it harder for visitors to move naturally between practical information, exhibitions, events, membership, research, and the collection while exposing the organizational complexity behind the museum rather than the experience people came for.

/ SOLUTION

We reorganized the experience around user intentions instead of institutional departments, creating a unified architecture and flexible design system capable of supporting everything from ticketing and events to editorial content and thousands of artworks. The visual approach intentionally steps back, giving the collection room to lead while creating a consistent framework for navigation, discovery, accessibility, and future growth.

/ RESULTS

The new platform created measurable gains in engagement: session length increased by 20%, page views per visit grew by 18%, and views of upcoming events increased by 78%. More importantly, CMA gained a digital foundation that could connect content, commerce, research, and visitor services within a single experience while reinforcing its position as an institution investing seriously in digital innovation.

/ PROJECT OVERVIEW

Research started with a broader question: what does someone actually need from a museum online? For some people, the website is a practical tool for finding opening hours, parking, accessibility information, exhibitions, and tickets. For others, it is a research archive, a classroom, a source of inspiration, or even the museum itself. Understanding those different intentions helped us identify where institutional complexity was becoming visible to the user.

That thinking shaped both the experience and the system behind it. Instead of designing a collection of isolated pages, we created a flexible framework where artworks, stories, exhibitions, events, research, and visitor services could continually connect with one another. The result is a platform designed not only around a visit to the museum, but around the broader relationship someone can build with art before, during, and long after that visit.