Google’s Arts & Cultures App

Google created a service for learning about arts and cultures online. It is a fantastic tool to learn about many of the different categories from ‘Artists’ to ‘Historical Figures’.

The homepage introduces the user to the site with a banner image explaining the site, and gives them a ‘Daily digest’ consisting of intersting subjects.

Along the left tab you have partners, who are the people responsible for providing Google with the content;

Once you have selected the subject you want to look at, the site gives you a description along with the different exhibits about that subject;

Once an exhibit has been chosen, the site uses images and text to portray information about the subject to the user, as can be seen below;

Artists are shown similarly with a slight difference. The artists are listed alphabetically or by a time format in a timeline.

Again, selecting a specific artist allows you to read a short description about them and then also view their work.

The same is shown also for Hostorical Events and Public Figures as shown below;

What is very interesting is the places section is broken down into popular areas that can be explored inside by looking at images, 360 degree videos and documents about the area.

What is also very interesting is the Google homepage advertised a specific part of history on their homepage with a link to their cultures site, this was interesting to note as it enticed a large demographic of users into the service. Featuring certain days on the homepage of my site could do exactly the same thing.

The site was also fully optimised for mobile;

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FINISHED PARIS WEBSITE – PHP

Here’s the link to the completed website;

http://www.dynamic.artdesignhull.ac.uk/abrodie/

Initial design research

I am creating a photo portfolio of pictures taken in Paris, I thought it would be valuable to examine a few examples of current designs online. Since we Have to have a search feature. I think that the site should be more like a search engine. The landing page is a simple image of Paris with the search bar on top allowing the user to search. Once the user has searched it will bring the relevant results back with the option to search again. Here are a couple examples of the landing pages for search engines, bear in mind that I am not providing any other content than the image so the more content heavy pages will be irrelevant so I will be looking at the most simple ones.

Firstly an clean simple landing page is vital, as you can see above from Bing and Google, there is the search box and not much else, apart from Bing strands out a little more as it has an image behind it, this works well and I think I should use this in the design I make.

http://pollenlondon.com/carine-marque/

Have a brilliantly designed homepage, it combines an image and a white box with the title and the category of the industry that they work within. This could work really well with the search bar for the Paris site. Since Paris is seen as luxury, romantic place to be, it would work well to market this site as a more luxury service, and this has been achieved well through Pollen Londons’ website.

Flickr has an unusual way of presenting the images, just by using a grid where the images are only aligned with vertical size, it makes for an interesting format.

Since I am only placing ten images on thew site, there is only going to be a small return for any searches conducted. Therefore, I have found the design of pocketsquaredesign.net to be quite relevant to mine, they have created large views of the images, with text above to describe it, I think this would work really well in my design.

Choosing the Images for my php based site.

Since I am creating a site that is thematic of Paris, I have selected 10 of the images of around the area that show off the area. I have tried to select images of architecture, food and other things I consider to be relevant. I think it is important to allow the user to search for the images in their own way, as google shows in its adwords keyword planner there are many different ways users search for the same thing. See below the many different searches carried out by users for a paris holiday.

Therefore, because the english language is so vast, I think it is vital to correctly tag my images for the user to find the relevant content. That is why in each image I have searched google keywords for the most relevant words and used them to tag my images, this will mean when I make my php database table I will have searchable words that will bring up content.

The first image I have chosen is a an amazing image of a really large sunset in the centre of paris.
I used google keywords to help me pick my tags, I searched for “Sunset”.

The tags I will use are;
– sunset
– sunrise
– street
– tourists
– visitor
– holiday
– paris

The next image I have chosen is of the Gard Dy Nord, the main train station in Paris that connects England to France through Eurostar. I used google keywords to help me pick my tags, I searched for “Gard Dy Nord” and “Eurostar”.

The tags I will use are;
– hotel gare
– station paris
– hostels
– eurostar
– train station
– london
– paris

This image is of the famous Eiffel Tower, the most iconic part of Paris, this is an important image to include. I searched for “Eiffel Tower”

The tags I will use are;
– eiffel tower
– restaurant
– dinner
– tour
– night
– monument
– lights
– 58 eiffel

This image is rarely visited by tourists and is the central business district of Paris. I searched for “La Defense”.

The tags I will use are;
– grande arche
– arc de la defense
– fraser suites
– mercure
– architecture
– monument

This image is iconic Paris, A shot of the louvre from a distance captures the grand scale of the tourism spot. I searched for “Louvre”.

The tags I will use are;
– louvre museum
– mona lisa
– le louvre
– monument

This image is within the Louvre, a shot of the crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa. I searched for “Mona Lisa” and used the same tags as the louvre image above.

The tags I will use are;
– louvre museum
– mona lisa
– le louvre
– portrait
– hotel florence
– 1963
– monument

This is an image of the Arc de Triomphe, a marvellous tourist site in Paris, I searched for “Arc de Triomphe”.

The tags I will use are;
– monument
– waldorf
– arc de triomphe

This image is of the Citroen Champs-Elysees showroom store that features a slide down the middle. I searched for “Citroen” and “Champs-Elysees”.

The tags I will use are;
– monument
– citreon
– c3
– avenue de champs
– champs-elysees

This is an image of frogs legs that I was served in a french restaurant. I searched for “Frogs legs”.

The tags I will use are;
– restaurant
– frogs legs
– cuisine
– les cuisses de grenouilles

The last image I have chosen is one of snails being served in a restaurant in Paris. I have searched for “snails”.

The tags I will use are;
– snails
– french
– dishes
– restaurant
– escargot

Changing my idea

I cannot use the previous idea because it follows no thematic ‘artwork’ as I did not fully understand the brief. Therefore, I have changed my idea to show off some of the nicest areas of Paris. This is going to allow me to tag the images with hashtags which are searchable on the site.