The Museum of Islamic Art represents a major milestone not just for Qatar but the whole of the Gulf. Spring was commissioned by the Qatar Museum Authority to develop the website for this world-class institution at mia.org.qa.

The focal point of the design done by SYNTAX was an abstracted visual representation of the the museum’s facade, acting as the site’s navigation tool. This approach reflected the modernist spirit of the museum‘s architecture as well as it created a web user experience that is easy to navigate and pages that are a pleasure to read and use.

The site’s dynamic Flash interface hides underneath it a number of technical breakthroughs. Our team has developed a site that takes Flash front-ended sites to a whole new level of content management control and scripted visual effects especially in implementing the Arabic version of the site. This is not your typical Flash based web site, but one that will allow dynamic content management, flexibility and future growth.

Technologies used: Adobe Flash CS3 for the front end and the symfony php framework for building the content management system for the website, MySQL was used as the database engine.

The project faced many challenges on top of which is launching the website in time for the opening of the museum back on November 22, 2008. A world-class event that can not happen without a website accompanying the opening of the event it self. Springers worked very closely with the team from QMA as well as SYNTAX to make it to that deadline with priorities for launch. Many sleepless nights to make it to the deadline.