The Client
The Archives of American Art is the world's largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States, housing more than 20 million items across research centers in Washington, D.C. and New York City. As a research center within the Smithsonian Institution, it serves an extraordinarily diverse audience — from casual art lovers discovering the collection for the first time to scholars conducting deep archival research.

The Challenge
The Archives had reached a landmark moment: the completion of a multi-year digitization initiative that made its vast collection available online for the first time. With that milestone came a new challenge. How do you design a digital experience that serves a casual visitor browsing out of curiosity and a specialist researcher hunting for a specific document — simultaneously, in the same interface, without compromising either experience?

Our Approach
In partnership with Winterhouse, RubyStudio participated in both creative and technical capacities.

Betsy Vardell joined the creative team to rapidly prototype a new user interface, beginning by defining the site's distinct user groups and mapping their needs, goals, and behaviors. That research drove every design decision — from navigation architecture to search functionality to the way individual items were surfaced and presented. The goal was an experience that rewarded both serendipitous discovery and precise, technical research: an interface where a first-time visitor might stumble upon a letter from Jackson Pollock, while a scholar could locate a specific microfilm record without friction.

On the technical side, RubyStudio served as the liaison between the Smithsonian's in-house technical team and the design team — translating the possibilities and constraints of a dataset of more than 20 million items into design decisions that were both ambitious and achievable. Understanding the data architecture at that scale was critical to ensuring the final experience held up under real-world use.

The Outcome
The result was an intuitive, accessible interface to one of the most complex cultural datasets in the country — one that made 20 million items of American art history genuinely browsable for the first time.