Bean Blog

It's not magic, it's CSS! Bean Creative's pro bono project for The Museum of Russian Art—showcasing simple ways to redesign using Cascading Style Sheets—proves its effectiveness with high honors.

Our redesign of the The Museum of Russian Art website won the second highest honor (Outstanding Achievement) in the Arts/Culture category of the Interactive Media Awards.

This award is made even more noteworthy since the entire redesign was implemented by changing a single CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file, NOT by altering any of the site's web pages.

What inspired this inspired redesign approach?
The redesign was undertaken as part of Bean Creative's paper presentation for the Museum's and the Web conference showing free and low costs ways to make a huge impact on museum websites.

Using CSS, we completely changed the look of site by altering fonts, colors, spacing and other design aspects of web documents by separating document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS).

Using this approach, Bean's designers were able to slash production time and costs to show how a full redesign is easily attainable for smaller museums.

In addition to a fresh new look and feel, our developers also implemented free social networking features and photo slideshow features to the The Museum of Russian Art museum site to boost interactivity and make the site more effective as a marketing tool.

Want the full scoop?
Check out our paper for the full details on how to accomplish all these interactive features without a massive budget. While our test case was a museum, the tools and approaches are applicable for all!