A Website Renaissance for Studio Museum in Harlem by Base Design

The 2025 PRINT Awards are coming soon! We wanted to take another look at some of our favorite winning entries from this year. In the coming weeks, we’ll highlight stellar creative work across the breadth of categories. The 2025 PRINT Awards will open for entries in November 2024.

Be sure to subscribe to our emails to learn when and where to enter your best work this year!

Founded in 1968, Studio Museum in Harlem stands as the nexus for artists of African descent. As a studio, it funds emerging artists and offers them studio space, and as a museum, it curates a compelling collection supporting underrepresented artists. It’s a place for stirring conversations and a hub for dynamic exchanges and sharing ideas about art and society.

Preparing to move and transition to a more formal posture, the Studio Museum tapped Base Design to help them redesign the website to align with its evolving mission. Established in 1993, Base Design is an international network of creative studios that focuses on cultural impact through simple yet imaginative brand narratives. The impressive client list includes Apple, The New York Times, MoMA, Bob Dylan Center, NY Mets, JFK Terminal 4, and Union Square Hospitality Group.

Base Design’s innovative website redesign for the cultural institution earned the company first place in the PRINT Awards IX/UX Design category.

Studio Museum’s aim for the project was to achieve greater accessibility for a broader community. Inspired by Harlem’s iconic brownstone stoop, the website design transforms into a dynamic meeting place, echoing the lively streets with sounds and voices.

Embracing noise as a concept, the team digitally mirrored the museum’s living space, presenting artworks immersed in the context of neighboring creations. Shifting the focus from artworks to the artists themselves, the new website features engaging video and audio clips within the margins—peripheral “chatter” to capture the animated essence of the Studio Museum’s setting.

It’s been a century since the Harlem Renaissance, a period widely remembered as a golden age for African American art, literature, music, and performance. Though, we’d argue there’s a new renaissance afoot, one that we’ll be talking about one hundred years from now, with Studio Museum in Harlem at the center, its gleaming new building, and Base Design’s dynamic website carrying the banner.

The post A Website Renaissance for Studio Museum in Harlem by Base Design appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Scroll to Top