NOELLE DARTS





Animations and videos to promote the Cooper Hewitt exhibitions and collection.

TEAM
Xhosa Fray-Chinn (Director of Video Production)
Olivia Manno (Social Media Manager)
Pamela Horn (Cross-Platform Director)

GOAL
As the Peter A. Kreuger Digital Media Intern, I was tasked with spending the summer assisting the Cross Platform Publishing department create video content for social media.

PROCESS
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum maintains an active Instagram account with almost 250K followers.

Aside from helping film and edit pre-planned interviews and content, my role as Digital Media Intern was to explore how new animations and videos could diversify the feed and drive engagement.
Cooper Hewitt example Instagram feed + post

At first, I experimented with:
  • Animations of the Andrew Carnegie Mansion (where the museum is housed), inspired by my walks around the grounds

  • Colorful drawings of figures associated with the collection’s history

However, after conducting a deep dive into Cooper Hewitt’s Instagram engagement patterns, I noticed their feed primarily includes:
  • High-quality photographs of objects from the museum’s collection
  • Exhibition previews and event promotions
  • Artist and studio interviews

I observed that:
  • Posts featuring objects from the collection performed reliably
  • Posts with motion or storytelling (e.g. artist interviews) were more likely to go viral

This suggested an opportunity: animating static objects could add novelty and boost engagement while staying aligned with the museum’s voice.

  • Another way I created a new energy while staying consistent with the brand identity was by creating a handwritten version of the standard Cooper Hewitt font, which I titled Margaret (after Andrew and Lousie Carnegie’s daughter).


  • Since the Cooper Hewitt Instagram feed displays colorful objects, I used bright backgrounds in my animations to match.  
  • I picked relatively simple objects from the collection because they made more sense as drawings

Final result: nine animations of objects in the Cooper Hewitt permanent collection.