I made us a print stylesheet for object pages on the collections website. (What does that mean? It means you can print out the webpage and it will look nice).

Printout of Object #18621871.. before stylesheet.

Printout of Object #18621871 after stylesheet. Much better. Office carpet courtesy of Tandus flooring.

This should be very useful for us in-house, especially curators and education.. and anyone doing exhibition planning.. (which right now is many of us).

It’s not very fancy or anything. Basically I just stripped away all the extraneous information and got right to the essential details, kind of like designing for mobile.

cascading style sheet is cascading.

In a moment of caffeinated Friday goofiness, Aaron printed out a bunch of weird objects he found (e.g. iPad described for aliens as “rectangular tablet computer with rounded corners”) and Scotch taped them all over Seb’s computer screen as a nice decorative touch for his return the next morning.

What we realized in looking at all the printouts, though, is that the simplified view of a collection record resembles a gallery wall label. And we’re currently knee-deep in the wall label discussion here at the Museum as we re-design the galleries (what does it need? what doesn’t it need? what can it do? how can it delight? how can it inform?).

I don’t yet have any conclusions to draw from that observation.. other than it’s a good frame to talk about our content and its presentation.

..to be continued!