Case Studies

We developed a series of prototypes and design treatments, which we refined with the gallery to create the final scope for both the online collection and interactive system. While programmers worked to develop this for the ten thousand portraits, multimedia designers and artists worked with different curators to develop custom features on individual works.

We devised a publishing system to harvest all the collection data to drive both the interactive touchscreens and the web site from the Gallery's MultiMIMSY collections management software; this was subsequently developed into COBOAT, our general tool for such needs.

For the touchscreens, we used our proprietary CAV system, which was extended with special features for the project - for example we added the ability to embed custom elements in Flash, and a dynamic searching system for the people who are the subjects of the portraits. Some of our work was never seen by the public: for example, the NPG has some very large portraits of famous political events, featuring as many as 300 identifiable individuals. We built a custom workbench used to mark out the face of each person and link it to the individual's record; this was used to compile the database which ultimately generated the system's popular "who's who" feature.

Finally we developed the content of the Portrait Explorer into a CD-ROM sold in the NPG Shop and online.

The Results