With so many public artworks lost already, the website is a resource that promotes, educates, and will play a role in preservation and restoration of heritage works. Whether accessible, hidden, or lost, this site reconnects the people of New Zealand with information about these incredible treasures across the motu. After much hard work and dedication from the Public Art Heritage team and Effect, we are thrilled to share this remarkable resource with you.
Many users would be discovering these public artworks and their significance for the first time, while others, with existing knowledge or academic backgrounds, would require advanced filter options to search for specific public artworks by artist, material, year, or location. To meet these diverse needs, we offered two pathways to explore the collection: a detailed list view and an interactive map. Additionally, we recognied the importance of providing users with an A-Z index to navigate all the represented artists.
We also wanted the design system to align with the Public Art Heritage visual identity, which is familiar to the public and featured across their plaques, social media, and other materials.
The system needed to support both location-based and list-based browsing, so we used Mapbox—a powerful map API—to visualise the data managed by Public Art Heritage, in Sanity, a highly customisable headless content management system. We seamlessly mapped the custom data to design content and functionality that invites users to explore and engage with the extensive collection of artists and their artworks.s. Each artwork had a range of custom metadata, enabling us to accurately show locations across the country and provide filter options so users could search by the references in each record, such as public access status, material, year, and more. Using Next.js to build the website's front end ensures this functionality is fast and responsive. Results load instantly as users refine their choices. As artworks are discovered, revitalised or uncovered the collection within the database grows.
The site is designed to be a central repository for the artworks in an intuitive and flexible online platform.
Sanity Headless Content Management System
Sanity differs from traditional content management systems. It is a versatile headless CMS that comes with heaps of out-of-the-box features making it one of leading editing experiences for content managers around the world. It can be tailored to meet the needs of each project. You can create unique documents and components that allow your website to be built in real time. The advantage of it having modern tooling allows the Sanity Studio, an editing platform that helps bring content to life, to be deployed wherever you need. "Headless" means that the content has the ability to display across multiple channels simultaneously.
Mapbox
Mapbox brings locations to life with maps that are highly functional and stylised to your needs. It can allow us to optimise and generate visualisations and insights about location data. With powerful out-of-the-box functionality for search, real-time data and more. Mapbox supports a range of user friendly tools such as base maps, design tools and upload management that allows it to be accessible and customisable. It offers support for custom data and provides industry leading performance allowing users to access the same map responsively across devices. This makes it the smoothest way to integrate maps into any application or project.