Jewish Cultural Quarter
The Jewish Cultural Quarter (Joods Cultureel Kwartier) holds five institutions across Amsterdam: a historical museum, a seventeenth-century synagogue, a library, a children's museum, and a theatre that stands as a war memorial. In 2017 we brought their five separate websites under one identity at jck.nl. It was my final project as Lead Developer at Total Design, working alongside the studio's designers, and I think the most ambitious.
Merging five websites into one
The Jewish Cultural Quarter had separate websites for the Historical Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue, the Ets Haim library, the Children's Museum, and the Hollandsche Schouwburg. We created separate landing pages for each location, and brought everything under a single domain with a consistent look and feel.
Screenshot of jck.nl
Exposing the museum collection
While the website was being developed, JCK migrated their cultural heritage database of documents, paintings, photographs, posters and religious artifacts to a new system with an open API, so we could access them through the website and use them in articles and longreads. The homepage had columns with key pieces from their collection.
The museum collection highlights, displayed in scrollable columns.
To present both specific objects and narratives from Amsterdam's Jewish Cultural Quarter, designer Thomas Pleeging envisioned a layered website encouraging fluid movement between exhibitions, longreads and items from the museum's vast digital collection. To realise that design we created a standalone React application with Drupal 8's REST API behind it, one of the first headless CMS builds in the Netherlands at this scale. At the time there were no frameworks like Next.js and no recipe book for the server-side rendering or the page transitions the design asked for.
Modular components
A website for a major museum will last between five and seven years, and redevelopment is often coupled with a new look and feel. What's often left behind in the redesign are the smaller applications built along the way for temporary exhibitions. I always encourage organizations to develop their style guides into reusable components, so the primary website can evolve alongside archival content. For the JCK, we built the menu as a separate module that could be used on both the primary website and for the Charlotte Salomon exhibition.
The menu was developed as an npm module to use across multiple projects.