Designing:
Interactive + web:
The Brooklyn Rail
The Rail has published its legendary free paper for 24 years. Over the last few years, the Rail has grown to publish daily conversations on The New Social Environment and exhibit curatorial projects throughout the year. After many years of tinkering around the edges, we were able to raise enough money to fully refactor and merge the content, which included over 30,000 articles, more than a thousand videos, and innumerable images and descriptions. This enabled a powerful new design at brooklynrail.org, which is currently in its first phase.
The new site represents the Rail as a social organism that connects people around the world through a free printed monthly publication, virtual daily conversations, and periodic exhibitions in addition to special issues and projects. Sections now each have a home, writing and images have space, and all of what we do is now connected. The site is built to prioritize accessibility, and now has a dark mode.
In our next phase, before the end of 2025, we will be connecting our readers to our vast 24-year archive of articles and videos through the connections that artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, writers, and political thinkers have with each other. So many of the conversations in the Rail reflect how we as artists do not stand alone. You will slowly see these connections coming through from the present on backwards as we thread together the people mentioned throughout all our conversations.
The Rail’s new website is more garden than building. As we tend to our garden, as with the paper, we will give form to the Rail’s rigorous routine and absolute spontaneity with a tightly systematized design that is broken up by moments of difference and dissonance. And as ever, we will aways put our artists and writers and their freedom first.