Alexandria: Digital Archive
Digital archive for everything imaginable.
Prompt
I wanted to reimagine how an archive would be made available to everyone in this day and age, and what better archive to draw inspiration from than the Great Library of Alexandria. At the height of its "power," every ship that would come into the port of Alexandria would offer any texts they had to be copied into the Great Library.
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Drawing from the Great Library for the namesake and core idea, Alexandria seeks to deliver a similar grip on society as the Great Library had on the Mediterranean at its peak.
Artistic rendering of the Great Library of Alexandria. Image from medium.com.
Initial Designs
For the initial color pallet, I decided to go with purple as at the time of the Great Library purple was often used with royalty and was a common color in Egypt. Given that the program is going to be used by modern people, I wanted to go with a clean and minimalist design style that fits today's design landscape. The logo was made both resemble a book and an "A" with a small book-mark symbol on the bottom. The book-mark is then repeated throughout the website and used as a visual indicator of what page the user is on.
Final Designs
For the adjusted designs, I made the cabinets animated on the landing page, log-in, and sign-in pages. The archive page had its trending searches adjusted to look less static and more fluid. A few more pages were added, being the home page and the settings page. The home page is used to get a general understanding about what Alexandria has to offer and works as a control panel for the user. Once the user goes to the archive page, they gain a different task bar that reflects what's in the archive as a whole. If the user wants to get back to the home screen they just hit the logo.
