NPG Portrait Competition Website & Voting Kiosk

Every three years, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG) asks artists in the United States to submit one of their recent portraits to a panel of experts in The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The finalists are displayed in a gallery in the NPG museum as well as on the website.

The NPG team tasked me with helping modernize the competition branding and redesign the website. For the website, there were a couple of elements: 1.) the main website and 2.) a voting mechanism for both the website and an in-gallery kiosk.

To give the competition a more modern feel, I recommended updating the colors from gold and grey to black and white. I also proposed updating the fonts to sans serifs. These style changes not only modernized the design but increased accessibility and better showcased the artwork. 

For the website, I worked closely with our development team as we needed to create a voting mechanism that worked well on both the website and the in-gallery kiosk. I lead a series of tests to evaluate the UX and functionality, leading to a recommended solution that served the needs of both platforms.