Responses by Jacques Letesson, managing director and Thomas Byttebier, digital director, Base Design

Background: The objective of the new website was to create a coherent digital presence for the Paris-based art museum The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain to support its goal of inviting new audiences to participate in a dialogue about contemporary art. We incorporated its extensive social content from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Deezer, creating a modular design system that allows the editors to showcase the foundation’s incredible collections.

Highlights: We designed a large amount of responsive components in Sketch based on real content. Since most of the site’s pages are built to be fully modular, it allows the team at The Fondation Cartier to pick and order website modules in different variations. Also, we designed FCartier, a legible screen typeface that has humanist curves to make it more artsy.

Challenges: For expansive institutions like The Fondation Cartier, a good, solid structure ensures that content relations can last for years beyond the initial website. Our developers took weeks to figure out and test the most meaningful content structure.

Favorite details: The layered, blurry effects that appear when the user interacts with the chatbot or the image overlay. It creates little moments of stripped-down design to allow visitors pure and deep interaction with the content.

Technical features: The Fondation Cartier believes that contemporary art is for all. So we designed and built this website to be inclusive and accessible to everyone. We worked together with a web accessibility expert to ensure the website is fully WCAG compliant. While in development, we tested the site daily with screen readers and assistive technologies.

Anything new: We decided to experiment with a conversational interface as a layer on top of the website. Upon arrival on Fondation Cartier’s new website, users are greeted by a fully automated chatbot that answers all common questions and helps users discover the world of Fondation Cartier. For that, we used DialogFlow, a tool to build conversational interfaces which is powered by AI developed by Google.