The Frick Collection

The Frick’s legacy website was outdated on Drupal 7, and could no longer meet the needs of its growing digital audience. Content was scattered across multiple templates, search tools were limited, and accessibility fell short of modern standards. 

From a UX perspective, the site lacked the flexibility to showcase the museum’s extensive collections, exhibitions, and public programmes in an engaging way for casual visitors while meeting the depth required by scholars and researchers.

With the physical building also being closed for extensive updates, the Frick team wished to time the launch of the updated site to be released simultaneously with the building’s reopening.

Working in close collaboration with their internal team, we planned and delivered a full rebuild on Drupal 10. 

Keeping in close alignment with already established design signals, we designed an elegant, mobile-first interface aligned with the institution’s visual identity and implemented WCAG 2.1 AA compliance to ensure broad accessibility. The project included building a robust, searchable collections catalogue that integrates seamlessly with the museum’s existing collections management system. 

The two major changes were Paragraphs and media usage; 

• For Paragraphs, we switched from using regular fields to components so content editors didn’t have to go into the Drupal code structure to add what they needed, and can simply add content directly to the page using Paragraphs. 
• As for media, we updated Frick to the Media Library. Previously, they had to add the code to embed the video, and the Frick team would then have to manually change it everywhere it was referenced. With the Media Library, they only update it once and it automatically updates across the site wherever it appears. The duration and description of the video are also extracted, so that information doesn’t need to be manually updated. 

Both of these changes were critical in streamlining the CMS so the Frick staff could easily update content, add new exhibitions, and publish scholarly resources without developer intervention.