Art history is a blood-soaked, backstabbing saga of sex, obsession & madness. It's awesome, and no one is talking about it.
(Until Now)
What does it take to make history interesting?
(Stories)Stories. The scary, romaintic stories we’ve told round the campfire for generations. Storytelling is primitive, and we love it, and we remember it. Education began with stories, and its time to bring them back. I started Trivium Art History with artist and educator Rick Love — to share the wild untild stories of art history. We’re bridging the gap between the academic world and entertainment — creating a beautiful platform full of the best content availalble. We want to make education free for everyone, but first it has to be interesting.
Trivium is a new kind of textbook.
A modern, accessible place to explore art history — as beautiful as a magazine and sensational as a tabloid. We're balancing academic rigor with contemporary storytelling, because learning should be exciting — in the classroom and out.
Fig. 1 — Caravaggio
Murdered a guy. The Pope forgave him.
Trivium is designed for exploration.
Bold images to keep it exciting — every line of copy crafted to peak your interest, encourage investigation. Two-column layout allow users to browse and read simultaneously, and every page seamlessly connects you to the next great story.
Built smart, from the ground up.
Every page, every line of code. It’s a big job, and I get up early every morning at to add content, build new features, and work with our growing network of collaborators. Trivium is my passion and my playground — a place to test interactions and push my technical limits. I’ve hidden a lot of smart stuff in there, here’s a nerdy list:
- Two-column layout balances reading & browsing
- Designed in-browser to test interactions
- Interconnected structure keeps users exploring
- User tested for clarity and discovery
- Responsive and touch enabled.
- Headlines & copy structured on memory psychology
- Taxonomies for mapping by theme, geography & timeline
- Collaborating with writers, historians, and students
- All content public domain or educational Fair Use
- The first single source for rare writings by artists
- Processwire CMS chosen for flexibility
- Front-end built in jQuery, .less, and html5
- Files compressed & unified to minimize server calls
- Image files delivered by viewport size via lazy load
- Icons embedded in SVGs, fonts in base64
- Twitter & Bitly APIs hooked for post-on-publish
- Pinterest’s new location pins integrated for collections
- Markup and site architecture optimized for search
- Meta in place for Facebook and Pinterest open graph
- Images alt tagged with fall back on no-script for crawling