The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is a local museum with a national presence. Located near Rotterdam, it is a museum of art, history but most of all people. They do things just a little bit different, with a smile. This friendly museum won the Dutch national museum price in 2019.

A museum like that deserves a website that is at least as approachable as the physical building. The museum already had a visually appealing website, based on a distinctive style by KesselsKramer. Something was missing though. There was no presentation of the collection. And the site had accumalated too much information over the years and was in need of a decluttering.

In October 2020 the building was closed for renovation. Around the same time I teamed up with Nienke Huitenga to ‘renovate’ the site as well. We proposed to use the same approach with the website as with the building: keep what was working (like the visual identity) and build on those fundaments.

We organised a series of workshops (mostly online because of the covid pandemic) where all of the key staff of the museum could deliver their input on the site. In a process of co-creation we went through the vital parts of the site and redesigned those pages together. The end result was a series of new site components and a distinctive part of the site specifically for ‘art stories’ that are used to showcase the most important parts of the collection.

The museum reopened on May 14th 2022 with a beautifully renovated building ánd a renovated website. Hence, not a revolution, but an evolution.