Redesign of Van Gogh Museum website with a new concept and smart functionalities

The Van Gogh Museum has thoroughly changed its website. The website, which receives more than 8.5 million visits annually, now offers even more opportunities to inspire people with the work and life of Van Gogh. The redesign was realised together with digital agency DEPT® (concept and design) and tech agency Q42 (development).

Two years ago, Studio Dumbar (part of Dept) developed a new identity for the museum with a focus on the combination of colour and the work of Van Gogh. The redesign of the website is an extension of this idea. Each page can have one of the colours in the colour palette, inspired by Vincent’s quest for colour, from dark to light. The Van Gogh Museum already made an enormous amount of content available, but it wasn’t easy to convert into a different format. That is why DEPT® came up with new content formats that allow for richer stories, with interactive images and videos, but also shorter stories, with which the museum can quickly respond to current events.

Tech agency Q42 developed a new feature called ‘Vincent for Scale’, that playfully shows how large a painting is. By placing the art next to a figure of Van Gogh, who was 1.64 meters tall, the visitor can see at a glance the actual size of the work. In developing the website, extra attention was paid to the accessibility for users with a disability. The website is optimised for screen readers used by blind and partially sighted people for navigation. Furthermore, the collection is more searchable, offers more substantive information for interested parties, and allows visitors to zoom in to the smallest details of the paintings thanks to the ultra-res storytelling tool Micrio, developed by Q42.

Martijn Pronk, Head of Digital Communication at the Van Gogh Museum: “The teams of Q42, DEPT® and Van Gogh Museum have done a fantastic job. They have built a contemporary site that is at the core of a digital Vincent van Gogh world. With this, we will continue to build on the success of recent years.”