Description:

Helen Flora Scales is a noble New Zealand artist born in 1887 in Lower Hutt who like many woman artists relinquished her art practice because of family demands and because she felt invisible in the eyes of critics and curators. There was only limited information available about Flora Scales’s art and life until now.

Flora Scales Project is a result of many years of research and dedication that have been invested into finding as many missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle as possible with some coming from various parts of the world. The project is about finding their place, verifying their validity and carefully cataloging them. The hope of the authors is that by publishing Scales’s story some misconceptions and imbalances in art history would be adjusted.

The design approach in this project has been empathetic towards the artwork, one that would support the art without being overpowering, structured with purpose. Form needed to follow function as it is important to have the information hierarchy well-organised to make it easily digestible.
Throughout the design process, we aimed to digitally emulate the feeling of being in a gallery with artworks as the central focus.

We have built the platform for the Flora Scales Project using a modern technology JAMStack architecture. This allows the website to load extremely fast and to keep the data safe and secure.
The website passes WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance for accessibility and introduces a new accessibility mode that disables all the motion, makes the fonts larger, increases the colour contrast and makes the links hovers more obvious to ensure it caters to user types.
For the technology stack, we have used NuxtJS for the frontend, Statamic as a Content API & CMS, AWS and Netlify for hosting.

The result is a beautifully crafted art gallery-style catalog website presenting the material on Flora Scales’s life and art, most of which has not been readily available before.