Numero Uno: Charmingwall

When I first came across this website, I was immediately engaged with the graphical animation of the site. Granted, it is the website for a New York Art Gallery, so it should have some degree aesthetic pleasure, but the elegant ways in which the website transitions from page to page capture its viewers and encourages them to explore the entire site.

Let's start with the specifics. The home page has one navigation system that links the page to logical places for an art gallery website. It has your typical: store, about us, artists, news, location/hours, and contact. It remains simple at the top of the screen on every page of the site proclaiming it as the primary navigation. Each grouping has its own secondary navigation, that also make logical sense. For example, "artists" has a secondary navigation of all the artists, and the "store" has prints, gift certificates, view cart, and checkout. The secondary navigation disappears for different groupings but the primary nav always stays at the top. Once you click on the link, the link changes from gray to a light blue. It is hard to get lost since the color scheme is constant throughout the primary and secondary navs to remind you where you are in the website. Lastly, the home page is the first group on the primary nav, so there is never a point where you cannot get back to the home page.

Home Page

Charmingwall seems to have a moderately deep architecture. Each primary nav grouping has its own page, and only the store, artists and news links have additional page information that requires additional links. For example, you cannot access the store checkout page if you are in the news page. I do not find this a bad thing since the architecture makes perfect sense, there is no reason to have a checkout link in the news section since it would just be cluttering. The only time the checkout would be accessed would be if you bought something in the store.

Store Page

The typography actually does not have any apparent heirarchy, although it still works and does not really need it. The content sections are just body format. The headings are made apparent only by the change in link color from grey to blue of the primary and secondary navs. It makes for a simple and elegant page and does not need larger redundant headings, it is already clear what the content is about. The labels of the navigation are perfectly clear. Every label gives you exactly what it says.

The structure of the site remains relatively the same on each page. The primary nav is the same at the top on each page, and some graphical form of the logo Charmingwall is incorporated into the information. The change in graphical forms of the logo serve as an elegant way to transition between primary nav pages. They are all unique and as I said before also serve to capture you and encourage you to explore all the links to see what other creative graphic animations there are. The only negative part about this is the logo is very large and takes up the whole body of the page, so due to its size and graphical attractiveness, it detracts the viewer from the actual information.

News Page

About Us Page

Besides the large logo graphic, other imagery includes the thumbnails of prints from each artist in the store page, and a sample of a work of each artists in the artists page. And an important note to mention, the graphic transition to the store(see pic above) and artists pages actually pushes the large charmingwall logo aside to make the thumbnails and samples more of the focal point of those pages which is very clever and effective.

Artists Page

Whenever you view a specific print there is a "buy" icon that is graphically similar to the logo animation which invites you to roll your mouse over it. When you do it starts shooting out sparks repeatedly until the mouse is taken off. While it can be kind of cheesy, it does draw you into the buy button and definitely captures your attention, which is clearly the point of the animation.



The general color scheme of the website is a combination of a dull pastel of light green, blue, yellow, and black. The different prints have their own colors but for the website it is just those colors. I believe these colors were chosen because they mimic the cartoon style of most of the artists' prints that the gallery carries. The graphics and colors setup a certain atmosphere for these works to be viewed.

In conclusion, I believe the purpose of this website is to be aesthetically pleasing, draw in the viewer to explore the entire website and the artists, and sell prints of the works. There is no search option but I do like how the works can be categorized not by artist but by the categories: for the office, kid-friendly, most recent, most popular, and featured.

There is one aspect about this website that could stand improvement . While it is very entertaining to watch the graphical transitions between the pages as a first time user, once you have explored the website several times, it gets to become time consuming and irritating to wait for each animation before switching pages. Perhaps a solution to this would be a button in the corner giving the user the option to turn off the animated transitions and just go straight to the links. However, overall I believe this is a very well done website that does serve its purpose to advertise the gallery's artists and sell prints of their work.