Altoona Historical Society

Roles

Lead User Experience / Interactive Designer
Cartography
Media Editing and Content Management

Tech + Industry

Interactive Digital Kiosk
Content Management System
History / Tourism

Overview

After being awarded generous funding from a well-known social media platform, the Altoona Historical Society (AHS) sought to create an experience for their newly built visitor center. The exhibit would attract visitors to the region while illuminating points of interest, the long history of the city, current and upcoming events, bulletin board type notifications, and notable occupants of the city and its nearby areas.

The AHS chose to go with a rustic skeuomorphic type design that alluded to the history and age of the city.

Challenges

• Historical low-quality imagery (often lifted from a PDF version of a book)

• Original creation of a map of the city of Altoona with the ability to add and remove points of interest as needed

Solutions

• Post-processing and uniformity of resolutions and upsampling imagery.

• Structured dynamic CSV and spreadsheet content matrix within Google Sheets.

What I love about this project

Designing a stylistically rich user interface alluding to the skeuomorphism spectrum of the design was the highlight of this project. I used minimalistic and clean designs that utilized few elements to tell a story. The client aimed to keep this historical heritage to the application while reviving archival imagery and content with a new form factor featured in their visitor center.

DISCLAIMER:

Photographs are copyright of their respective groups and owners and used here to illustrate ideas or physicality of digital products and experiences. Work displayed here may have been completed in collaboration with individuals and businesses.