Gallery: The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Just Put 200,000 Items Online
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The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, just made 200,000 items—92 percent of the museum’s entire collection—available online.
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took a year and a half, dozens of staffers, and digitization experts from The Netherlands to complete. Staffers often had up to four photoshoots, like the one seen here, happening at once.
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You could quickly lose hours of your life pouring over the online reservoir of objects. The "digital collection materials" includes a broad range of gadgets, like this Creamsicle-colored calculator, designed by Mario Bellini in 1973.
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In that same collection is this old-school dictaphone from Thomas A. Edison, Inc. It's dated 1953.
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The Cooper Hewitt's collection dates back to B.C., but the museum is constantly acquiring new work. Yves Béhar's popular Jawbone fitness tracker is one such device.
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Another particularly addicting section is the "Cuban graphic design" collection. This poster is by Paul René Azcuy Cárdenas. He designed it in 1976 for the Cuban Film Institute.
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The new online archives let users search for related objects by color. For this vivid Fidel Castro poster, from 1968, a legend off to the side offers to let you see more objects with the color wheat, indian red, sienna, dark slate blue, and goldenrod.
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The "From start to finish" collection features sketches and prototypes along with finished work. Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram, sketched this label for Manhattan Records in 1984.
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The finished label, here.
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Clearview, a font designed in the 1990's by design firm Meeker and Associates, was created to improve legibility on highway signs. The Federal Highway Administration has since rescinded its opinion that Clearview is the most safe font for signage, but the work is still remarkable, and it belongs to the Cooper Hewitt.
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One of the best parts of the Cooper Hewitt's new online database of objects is how the curators link them together. The page that features Clearview will prompt visitors to check out this eye testing chart from 1937. It was manufactured by Manufactured by Soft-Lite Lens Company, Inc.
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In the "20th-21st century architectural drawings collection," a 1985 drawing of a house for a movie star.
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The same collection even features drawings of structures that have yet to be built, or won't be built. This proposal for new parks and wetlands in lower Manhattan, to help absorb rising tides, is one such design.
