Naturalis - Masterpieces
Tailored Web Application
Bringing nature’s greatest wonders virtually to life
Challenge
Naturalis has one of the world’s largest natural history collections, with more than 41 million objects. While the museum was closed for renovation, they wanted to create an engaging, educational and widely accessible platform with Naturalis’ most admired masterpieces.
Outcome
An intriguing virtual exhibition with the most beautiful and special treasures of Naturalis, guiding and educating visitors on natural history.
Impact
A captivating platform that not only displays the top 200 masterpieces of Naturalis and educates the general public on natural history, but is also a valuable extension of Naturalis.nl.
Strategy
The virtual exhibition had to appeal to a wide audience from school students all the way to academic scientists. Searching for information about their favorite wonders of nature needed to be easy, self-explanatory and keep them coming back for more.
The seamless design of the platform enables visitors to search for generic content as well as deep dive into details on individual item pages that are linked to the Naturalis database. The platform allows for easy expansion of content and is able to showcase more information as the Naturalis collection grows. Naturalis’ mission to spread knowledge is tackled by offering suggestions on other masterpieces waiting to be discovered and keeps visitors engaged and scrolling.
Creative
The web application had to engage and entertain visitors, while also facilitating content browsing in a seamless way. Intuitivity was therefore key. We also had to keep in mind that the design needed to be transferable to a bigger platform, as the web application was a forerunner for the new CMS website.
The web app is developed as a complete one page experience removing the need for prompts and guidance. With guidelines in place for beautiful and captivating nature photography, we were able to bring the masterpieces of Naturalis to life.
Technology
We developed the web application with the goal of generating excitement around the intriguing items of the museum’s collection. All content is extracted from Naturalis’ database, while the brand new photographs are presented in a ReactJS driven frontend.
System Integrations
Internal REST API, Sendgrid
Highlights
- The development of the web application and setup of the first top 200 masterpieces was only the start as Naturalis actively updates the collection.
- Working with such an intriguing and beautiful natural history collection was inspiring and brought us closer to nature.
