The RISD Museum’s website has won nine awards across six programs.
The Awards
The Webby Awards — Nominee, Best Visual Design: Function.
SCA Summit International Awards — Gold, Travel/Tourism/Nature Website.
WebAward — Outstanding Website.
W3 Awards — Silver for User Experience, and Silver for Visual Appeal and Utility.
The Davey Awards — Silver for Cultural Institutions, and Silver for Best Use of Video and Moving Images.
Communicator Awards — Distinction for User Interface, and Excellence in the Cultural Institutions category.
What the Site Does Differently
A museum’s collection site has a tension in it that most catalog software resolves the wrong way. The database wants records; the visitor wants a way in. Optimize for the record and you get something rigorous that no one browses.
The RISD Museum site was built to be browsable without being unscholarly — object records complete enough for research, wrapped in a structure a person can wander through.
The other decision worth noting is that the code was open-sourced. A museum platform solved once, in public, is a platform every other museum with the same problem and less budget can start from. The case study covers what that meant in practice.
About Pare
Pare is an AI-native digital consultancy, founded in 2007 as Oomph and rebuilt in 2026 for the AI age. The firm builds websites, platforms, and digital products — and the intelligence inside them — for the organizations people depend on most. Its cultural practice spans museums, zoos, cinemas and academic publishing.
Press inquiries: press@pare.co