The Museum partnered with Flyleaf to work on two companion websites that bring to life facts and photos chronicling the key players in African American and Afro Latino baseball history. The first site, which launched in April 2022, complements the physical exhibition "Barrier Breakers: From Jackie to Pumpsie" which premiered at the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium. The second site, "Negro Leagues Béisbol" launched in August 2022.
The main components of our work have been to: 1) Present historical photos, videos and copy in a captivating virtual environment; 2) Enhance the in-person experience at the exhibition; 3) Create a thoroughly engaging, seamless experience for mobile and desktop users; and 4) incorporate multilingual option for users to view the Béisbol site in Spanish and English
Working with the museum curator, we researched the history and the contextual information of the content to arrive at what we called “Future Classic” typefaces, colors, and iconography that pay homage to styles of the referenced eras while adding a contemporary flair suggesting the timelessness of the content. The custom templates were developed to be used for both websites but have distinct visual themes to better represent the content for each exhibition.
We organized rare photos in various easy-to-navigate pages: the main virtual exhibition, a page devoted to the key integration pioneer players, a timeline of famous Black firsts and/or cultural context, and a video vault. We implemented features which allow interactivity in ways that are unique to a web experience, including “flippable” baseball cards.
Thinking of the wide array of age groups who might visit the site we designed an easy browsing experience with multiple ways to sort (by chron or alpha), career highlights and awards, and historical photos and footage for each player. The timeline content use animated visuals to “fly in” as one navigates through time, including functionality for clicking to zoom in on details and read excerpts of historical documents.
For those who are seeing the exhibits in-person, QR codes linked to exclusive content on the site. The mandate to create a thoroughly engaging, seamless experience on mobile drove the design to allow for maximum flexibility for how folks wanted to explore the site. We also made sure to utilize photos at manageable file sizes with captions for screen readers and embedded YouTube-hosted videos for fast page-loading.