Project:
Renaissance Skin is a 5-year research project funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award. Based at King’s College London, the project is led by Professor Evelyn Welch. Over the 5 years, we will study the wide range of ways in which skin, both animal and human, was conceptualised and used in Europe between 1450 and 1700, a period of enormous change in terms of global contacts and connections, and scientific innovation.
This site is designed, on a practical level, to keep you informed of our events and other activities that we run or are engaged with. In the Updates section, you will find informal reports on research visits to museums or elsewhere and on seminars or workshops that various team members have attended. We are keen to open conversation on our research and the material that we use, and so the Themes section is intended to serve as a portal into some of our findings. Here, under the categories of ‘Defining’, ‘Breaking’, ‘Living’, ‘Consuming’, ‘Protecting’, and ‘Misbehaving’, you will discover sources that we have found interesting and have helped to shape our thinking. Thumbnail images of the sources within each category appear to the right of the screen, allowing you to jump to a particular source, or you can simply explore them all by scrolling down through the page. Clicking on the main image of the source will pull up a larger version – allowing you to focus on the details – and from here you can scroll through each source in a linear fashion. Crucially, this is an evolving resource and so we urge you to revisit often to discover what new material we have chosen to share.
Process:
I was the designer on the project King's Digital Lab, working closely together with a developer, analyst and project partners. The partners wanted visual aesthetics to be a large part of the site. Since the research was about skin, I enlarged and darken a section of an old illustration of a rhinoceros, used it as the background of the site which gave texture to the site and highlighted images added. I added light transparent layers to further evoke the sense of skin, which I integrated into the project logo as well. I translated the design into a prototype to create the base framework for responsive design and interactions, and continued working on it on the staging server alongside a developer to produce the final website.
