Mehreen Murtaza

portfolio Website Dos interface design Retro Technology contemporary art Web design

Web design for contemporary art.

Born in Saudi Arabia, artist Mehreen Murtaza's work explores broad themes of human existence and the progresses of modern of civilization. In her digital art, Murtaza dissects consumption patterns, and attempts to understand the intersecting worlds of technology and nature.... By rejecting the traditional wasli, pen, and brush, and opting to use contemporary tools such as computers and cameras, she renews past forms. (Excerpt from the artist's profile on Artspace)

Mehreen Murtaza approached me to redesign her existing portfolio website; a request that soon became an intensive collaborative project which I greatly enjoyed thanks to the great respect I have for Mehreen's practice as a contemporary artist.

We started with very broad themes exploring these key qualities and as the design evolved and simplified, the website's UI became an exercise in familiarity and a challenge to utilize and overcome the limitations of such an interface.

Ideas were sketched based on core qualities like time travel, juxtaposition and kitsch. New ways to navigate websites were also considered, such as text-based interfaces alongside cartography-inspired approaches. These ideas were then divided into 4 broad themes and further explored using related imagery:

Low-fidelity wireframes were designed by combining ideas 3 and 4: a nostalgic view of the internet where spliced information was given.

Nostalgia meets technology
At this point in the process, the design had evolved into the UI of an unnamed operating system. The next step was to decide the character of the UI, and DOS was seen as a great starting point. With its text-based interface and pop-up screens, it was a great analogy of Mehreen's retro-tech practice.

DOS screens used as inspiration points

Iteration, iteration, iteration

Since the primary function of the website was to showcase Mehreen's artwork, the "Work" section of the website was heavily worked on.

Multiple designs were tested to determine how the work should be categorized and displayed. From a text-only approach that was very true to DOS, the design became an a image-based UI where mini-screens resembling Mahjong tiles were used to show each project. This is done so that the user immediately jumps into Mehreen's strong visuals without an added layer of text obscuring the view.

Designs where the Work page is a pop-up menu populated with project titles. Clicking on a title opens another pop-up with the project description and images.

Evolution of the Work section where the pop-up menu is replaced by project-image tiles.

Project tiles option 1 where each image within a project is shown as a stack

Project tiles option 2 where only 1 image per project is shown in the stack. This design was chosen for its simplicity and lack of visual vibration

The final design

The final design allows each pop-up menu to open one on top of another, as a visual cue to travelling through the z-space of the virtual plane. These screens are designed to be dragged and dropped around the screen as the user "digs through" the information provided, but due to development constraints this feature will be added in the future.