Telephone | Jenn Spriggs

Project context

In 2020, as physical spaces between us widened, our hunger for artistic connection deepened. With traditional creative venues standing empty, a new type of gallery needed building.

A colleague of mine envisioned a modern reimagining of the game of 'telephone'—where art would evolve as it traveled across the globe, transforming in medium and meaning with each interpretation. Telephone the site and platform would be the online gallery that would share this project with the world.

I led the visual direction, crafting both the brand identity and an interactive map to trace these artistic mutations. The journey began with a collaborative workshop that I designed to align our team's vision for this creative endeavor.

Game Map

How do you design an interface that captures 1,000 artists playing a global game of artistic telephone? We needed to showcase both the intimate evolution of individual artworks and the massive scope of their journey—10,000+ pieces traveling across 72 countries.

The map served as both storyteller and wayfinder, needing to capture the game's evolving artistic journey while remaining intuitively navigable. The challenge was creating this rich digital experience while keeping it intuitively interactive.

I iterated through multiple design approaches, exploring various shapes and viewfinder crops while continuously testing how each version communicated both scale and intimacy. Each iteration helped refine how users would navigate through the art in a way that preserved the visual connection that represented the evolution from one step of the game to the next.

Works page

Telephone’s pages represented the works of a broad and diverse set of artists and mediums. The works page had to be flexible enough to accomodate seven different types of work — images, literary, sound-based pieces, video-based pieces, and physical works best represented through images like sculpture, and textile art. We even had choreography and dance displayed through video.

The biggest challenge came in representing works like poetry — which meant preserving the length of some lines of text, vs breaking them into a new line, which could compromise or misconstrue the meaning of the work.

Gallery viewers could also see a visual of where the artist lived and created their piece in the context of a global map, as well as this piece's place in the overall game map. I designed a navigational tray element to allow users a quick way to click between "generations".

Brand

The Telephone brand and design system embraces minimalism— mirroring the gallery's white walls in our digital space to spotlight artists' works. The monochromatic foundation is enhanced by strategic color coding that helps users navigate the game map. The combination of sans-serif typography and sharp-edged UI elements creates a distinctly modern aesthetic.

Drawing inspiration from American phone books, the design emphasizes the interconnected nature of the Telephone game's collaborative chain.

Messaging

An interactive, step-by-step guide demonstrates how artworks evolve through the game, illustrating the transformation as pieces flow between artists across generations—expanding into multiple interpretations before converging into a final work.

Using gamemap elements as visual aids, the guide traces an artwork's journey: from its origin as a single piece, through its branching interpretations by multiple artists, and finally to its culmination in a new singular work. This intuitive visualization helps gallery visitors grasp both the game's mechanics and its underlying theme of artistic evolution through collaboration.