Art in America has provided intelligent and rigorous coverage of the art world since 1913. In those 100 years, it has witnessed contemporary art shift from Surrealist paintings to Pop Art sculptures to digital exhibitions, all the while witnessing a rapidly changing media landscape. To celebrate its milestone 100^-year anniversary, Art in America engaged Code and Theory to continue this evolution as a leading editorial voice in art with a bold new website to coincide with a new print magazine redesign.

There were 3 objectives in relaunching artinamericamagazine.com: to align with the redesign of the print magazine being introduced at Art Basel, to encourage interaction and exploration across the site, and to increase advertising and subscription revenue.

AiA readers - art professionals, educators, students, and enthusiasts – come to the magazine for timely, in-depth and authoritative insights into art news, reviews, events, and features. Previously, the AiA website’s tangled structure and ambiguous tagging complicated a user’s navigation to this content. To elevate the expected AiA experience online without compromising the established brand, we leveraged the new print magazine’s design and editorial product offering to create an intuitive online experience that clearly organized and classified the publication’s compelling content.

Improving Site Architecture

An organizing principle was developed to simplify sections and navigation, to promote related content in order to boost traffic recirculation and to feature vibrant photographs, including a new parallax scrolling presentation.

Organizing Content

Identifying and classifying news, features, reviews, exhibitions and from-the-magazine material helped drive daily traffic to original content, increase return visits and complement print magazine content, which is integrated throughout the website.

Encouraging Interaction

Social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, were incorporated into all components of the design, such as a homepage module directing users to AiA’s Twitter account, and the AiA Newsletter sign-up in the site’s navigation.

The AiA redesign seamlessly incorporated more ads across the website and allowed for new sizes of ads. More advertisements meant more opportunities for AiA to package print and online deals, attract new partnerships with companies that do not advertise in the magazine, drive subscriptions to the magazine, and attract niche advertisers (artists, galleries, art schools) who want to directly market to AiA’s audience of devoted art patrons.