Media Majlis is the first museum dedicated to media in the Arab world. Opening its doors for the first time in 2019, this website is intended to be a key companion to the exhibition content and its interpretation, understanding, and reception by visitors.
The museum’s primary mode of communication and the principal means for learning is its exhibitions. Therefore the homepage starts with a full page cover feature of the current exhibition, then a listing of its events. There follows links to information about the Media Majlis, an invitation to start exploring their content, as well as the most recent articles from their blog - Majlis 360.
A bilingual website into Arabic has design implications, as the alignment of not only the content, but the navigation and logo also need to change. This also reveals the importance of content selection - as imagery will have the wording over different parts of them when the content shifts to Arabic.
A single exhibition page lists the details about an exhibition. At the end of the page, the connectivity between a single exhibition and other related content, such as other exhibitions or external links is shown. A selection of the media within the exhibition or connected to it (‘Explore content’) is also available to view. These all provide indications to other parts of content users can travel to. A physical exhibition can only go so far to showing you what is in its collection, but by supplementing that information on a website, the exhibitor is able to signpost and link across exhibitions in a way that would not be possible in the physical exhibition space.
The Explore Content page is a contemporary, future orientated, interactive and connected experience. This grid view showcases the object records, and encourages the exploration of the content by the user. This section is designed so as to complement the experience the visitors have on visiting the museum; and it allows the museum to supplement what is on display in the exhibition space - including the full film or interview when the exhibition has short clips, for example.
A single record connects the record to its thread, its location, its exhibition and its decade - allowing a user to navigate from one object to another, discovering as they go. Users can see the complex connections between objects.
The blog landing page highlights the blog posts, and includes a summary on rollover. The tiles are image lead, whilst also highlighting the key information.
Each single blog article contains images, text, as well as information about the author. There are also a series of tags at the bottom of the page, as well a signposts to the previous or next post.
