Galerie Charlot website: Yii + Museo Sans
Galerie Charlot is the contemporary art gallery in Paris where my friend works. It is specialized in digital art and features interesting artists like Antoine Schmitt (generative art), Jacques Perconte (digital video), Thomas Israël (video and interactive installations) among others. I made the new website for the gallery and it is now online.
Most of the fun was in the admin area, which is completely integrated with the public pages.
Admin buttons.
All the elements (artists, artworks, exhibitions, editions, press releases and news) needed to be associated to each other, which could have led to a very redundant db structure. I used Yii (mostly its Active Record ORM) and a single large associative table to achive that goal in a way that was simple and clean. Every row of the associative table contains one relation between two elements, any of them.
Unconventional relational table
And this is how relations are defined in the ActiveRecord class (that extends CActiveRecord):
|
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public function relations() {
// Get the current model class name.
$thisModel = strtolower(get_class($this));
return array(
'artist'=>array(
self::MANY_MANY,
'Artist',
// find columns 'artist_id' and the one of the current model
'relations(artist_id, ' .$thisModel.'_id)',
'scopes' => array('notTrash'),
'order' => '{{artist}}.name',
'select' => "id,name,active,description,filename,represented,active",
'together'=>false
),
);
} |
Images and Vimeo videos are also very easy to add, order, update, sort, activate/deactivate, soft-delete. To add/remove associations, the interface simply shows related elements on the left, and available ones on the right (with ajax search and pagination, thanks to the DataTables Jquery plugin).
Jquery UI sortable in action on the media library.
Add/remove media items from those already available.
On the design side, the commission was to create something white and invisible, with an almost anonymous identity (which is pretty common in the contemporary art market). I simply worked on a minimal, (almost) monochromatic, 12 columns grid layout. The big work was done by the beautiful Museo Sans, a typeface created by exljbris, with its elegant rounded corners that injected a “feminine” touch in a somewhat rigid design.
Museo Sans by exljbris