Sotheby’s

Established in 1744, Sotheby’s is one of the largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectables. In its time Sotheby’s has facilitated the sale of Marie Antoinette’s jewels, Biggie’s crown, and Monet’s nymphéas.

To support the sale of every anticipated auction, Sotheby's produce an auction catalog. The catalog is a treasured collectible in and of itself: usually found alongside art books on coffee tables. Its margins are full of thoughtful notes and corners are folded down to refer back to time and time again.

After hundreds of years of in-person auction experiences, the pandemic brought all of that to a halt – meaning auctions had to progress online. Selling the pieces virtually was straightforward, however trying to replicate the rich, immersive format of their auction catalog was harder.

Your Majesty was invited to design and build a premium, digital version of this catalog, putting art and its stories at the forefront of the concept through an immersive experience.

Thinking digital, not catalog first

To better understand the catalog and the business it serves we spoke to general managers, marketers, and curators at Sotheby's. Through user testing, we learned more about the benefits and drawbacks of the current digital catalog design.

We identified two key challenges to address during the project. First, the number of lots in a collection varies from as little as five to five hundred. The design and digital experience had to be built to accommodate as many or as few lots within each chapter.

Second, the catalog experience had to be built within a specific set of technical requirements. As the digital auction process was running on a traditional e-commerce platform, the lots and immersive catalogue needed to be linked so that users had the ability to bid and purchase their pieces.

The guiding principles

We paired our research with competitor analysis and a content inventory to develop five design principles. We used these principles to build a digital-first catalog, rather than attempting to recreate a digital version of the physical catalog.

1. Property Informed Design – Helping distinguish between catalogs and each chapter, we used the auction or lot subject matter to dictate the surrounding content and style.

2. Shortening the Digital Gap – Elevating the experience through tangibility and a sense of physicality to the digital catalog’s design.

3. Layering Information – Grouping content and disclosing it progressively to make long reads digestible for users and to create an experience that deepens, not disrupts.

4. Giving Users Control – Enabling users to play an active, not passive, role in their browsing experience enabling them to scan or dive deep as needed.

5. Flexing Sotheby’s Expertise – Surfacing Sotheby’s knowledge and expertise earlier in the user journey to add value and drive credibility.

A gallery of stories

From our research and resulting design principles we created the concept ‘A Gallery of Stories’. An experience that mimicked a stroll through a gallery, with each scroll offering a window into a theme and its related lots.

Playing with the horizontal and vertical scroll the ambition was to enable the user to step in and out of each window, with the option to dive deeper or step back.