In 2015 the Van Gogh museum launched the Touch app, which was received very well. But as all things must come to an end, the technology got old and the experience was not up to par anymore. Creating something new from something so successful was a tough challenge, as was capturing the nuances of Van Gogh’s brushes and strokes.

Together with the Van Gogh Museum, we created an user-friendly web-app and used innovative UX techniques and observed all accessibility standards. This ensured attention went towards the protagonist of this experience: Vincent van Gogh and his paintings.

In 2018 Van Gogh Museum presented Unravel Van Gogh: an improved version of the Touch Van Gogh app (2013), which was awarded four prestigious international prizes.

Numerous stories are hidden in and underneath the paint of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings: Unravel Van Gogh reveals what you cannot see with the naked eye. Touch is key to the experience, which is why we focus on the intuitive feeling of a smartphone touchscreen. Just like Van Gogh's work, the experience must be simple and easy to use.

The new Unravel Van Gogh allows you to discover more about how Van Gogh worked. Embark on a voyage of discovery on your smartphone, tablet or computer. The webapp is free to use, all you need is an internet connection. The webapp is also traveling the world, now displayed at paintings in Barcelona & Seoul.

We made a user-friendly design illustrating the story behind Van Gogh and his works in full glory. To make it a full experience for users, we created different sliding visuals with paintings, scratch art and explained the art through stories in the webapp. This way, everyone can unravel Van Gogh in a different way and on your own level, exploring something new every time. It’s difficult to see with the naked eye, but if you closely examine the Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, you’ll see grains of sand in the paint. Van Gogh painted the work outdoors, and sand blew onto his canvas. These details are expanded in the webapp. Van Gogh’s paintings conceal plenty intriguing stories that we managed to include in the webapp. The most important thing is that every interaction is super intuitive and based on touchscreen usage for smartphone, desktop and touch screens in the museum.

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From the launch at the end of December more than 125K people have visited unravel van Gogh in the museum. On a yearly basis this number will run up to two million people. The web app has already had 11.000 visitors in two months. On Facebook, two promotional posts reached more than 323K people and received almost 400K views. On Instagram, we reached 160K people and 222K views, and on Twitter we reached almost 6,000 people.