Museo Ricordi
The online museum of Casa Ricordi, the historic Italian music publisher.
- Working with
- Immerso, Casa Ricordi (Universal Music)
- Deliverable
- Website · Design
A site tracing the history of Casa Ricordi, the Milanese publisher founded in 1808 and today part of Universal Music, through a timeline of nine eras, long-form essays and archive video.
Two readers who want different things
Casa Ricordi already had the material: nine historical periods, from Giovanni Ricordi’s 1808 print shop to today, and full essays on the archive, on the copyright battles of the 1800s and on the Art Nouveau posters that effectively invented Italian advertising graphics. Some of those essays run past three thousand words.
Someone scrolling the timeline wants an overview of two centuries in a couple of minutes. Someone researching Ricordi as a theatrical impresario will read for twenty. The site had to work for both without either getting in the other’s way.
Excerpts that expand in place
Every story starts as a short excerpt next to an archive film, which is enough to get a sense of the era. If you want to read the rest, it expands right there. You don’t open a new page, lose your place or dig through a menu.
The timeline works the same way on a smaller scale: a date range, a title, one line and an image.
Why it stays on one page
You read a timeline in one direction, and it loses its meaning once you break it into chapters. So the whole history sits on one page, with the long texts folded inside it instead of moved somewhere else.