AOPA News

AOPA is looking to create a bank of contactors that can take care of the work of assembling and entering text, documents and media content into our artists’ online archives and retrospectives. Truth be told, this is the grunt work that needs to be done. It requires a great attention to detail and the perk is getting to know an artist’s oeuvre in depth. We are looking for students or graduates of art history and art criticism from college, cegep or university.

Here is the job description (en anglais et en français).

After much exploration, deliberation, trials and adjustments, the AOPA production team has finished working out how we want to design and program the top view of the single artwork page of Retrospective. The content here includes the artwork title, the year, a featured image or video, thumbnail details of the work and a multimedia slideshow.

It may not seem like much, and that’s how we want it. Our objective is to make sure the design and programming gets out of the way and lets users’ focus exclusively on the art.

There is, in fact, a lot going on in the background though. Retrospective is being designed to accommodate a large breadth of artistic practices. In this case, that means presenting images of artworks that have all kinds of aspect ratios: from ultra wide landscape images to the tall and skinny portrait images. The challenge was to find ways that both of these extremes and everything in between fit handsomely on the screen.

To do this, there is some mathematics going on in the background. Valeriu Tihai, AOPA programmer extraordinaire from Montréal’s south shore near Kahnawake, is responsible for the solid HTML and fluid CSS styling. Before a featured image is loaded, he gets its height and width and then calculates the aspect ratio. He then applies an appropriate style so the fit is perfect on all screens.

Val in his work, is adhering to the meticulously crafted graphic layouts developed by AOPA graphic designer Alex Tench, who works remotely from Vancouver. There are more of Alex’s solid design solutions to see on the next part of the page, which presents all the information curators, writers, students, historians and art lovers are looking for when they want to know more about your artworks.

That will be coming soon.