How do you make your online portfolio stand out from the crowd? The New York-based design studio HAWRAF has an answer: Pick up the phone.
The artist Marc Horowitz recently tasked HAWRAF with creating a new website design to showcase his work. Because Horowitz’s work tends to be on the conceptual and abstract side–he’s famous for driving across the country to have dinner with thousands of people for his piece The National Dinner Tour–having an explanation to go along with the work was a crucial aspect of the project. Rather than just including extra text like some portfolio designs might, the designers came up with a brilliantly simple solution to contextualize the art.
At first glance, HAWRAF’s design looks like a pretty standard portfolio. There are tabs at the top, with images below that represent 32 projects dating all the way back to 2001. But the designers, inspired by the audio tours you’ve probably experienced at a museum or gallery, added another element of interaction. In big block text at the top of the website, it says, “Call 1-833-MAR-CIVE.” When you do, you can hear the artist himself tell you stories about each project by simply dialing the reference number below each image.
It’s a mix between a museum’s audio tour, a podcast, and an interactive site. To understand the artist’s work, you have to call–there’s no bio at all, just another directive to call the number. And so, you do.
Hearing him talk about and analyze his work in a conversational, easy way as you look at it online is an entirely different experience than the usual descriptions that accompany artworks or projects in an online portfolio. Normally, I might have only given Too Soon a cursory glance while flipping through his other works and skimmed a bit of the description before moving on. But after listening to Horowitz speak about Too Soon, the work takes on an entirely new meaning–and the experience helps me understand Horowitz’s work in a much more intimate way.
Of course, if you don’t want to call there is an option to read about each work–but to do so would mean missing a truly novel way to experience art online.