The Sotheby’s Prize

Posted on by Tom Von Lahndorff

The Sotheby’s Prize was a yearly prize of $250,000 awarded to an art gallery for a groundbreaking exhibition. Prize entries were originally managed by tracking email submissions in spreadsheet. The process was labor intensive and suboptimal for judges to review entries. Sotheby’s came to me looking for a solution that would allow entries to be submitted via a website and be managed and reviewed with via a web-based backend. I built and designed a custom PHP application to accommodate the various workflows. The app included:

  • User account creation and verification.
  • Password reset form.
  • Submission for entering exhibition details, uploading documentation and uploading images.
  • Admin for managing Judge accounts.
  • Admin for updating website content.
  • Admin for adding yearly Prizes.
  • Admin for managing Prize entries.
  • Admin for tracking votes and judge feedback.
  • Automated and manual email updates.
  • Development: PHP, Hosting, Documentation, Training
  • Design: Responsive Site Design, HTML, CSS (SCSS), Javascript (JQuery), Graphics
Admin for sending emails from the Sotheby’s Prize web app.

Due to the unique requirements for this project I began by building out a plain vanilla version of the web app based on the initial, basic outline. This allowed for collaboration between me and Sotheby’s lead project manager to work together on hashing out the details of the workflow.

Once the details were worked out and we had a functioning product we moved into the design phase. Sotheby’s had an existing design language and, working with their documentation, I implemented a design that conformed to the existing aesthetics set out by the design language.

The Sotheby’s Prize web app settings, including automation of prize features and statuses by date. Setting dates controlled the ability to send submissions and homepage messaging.

The app was launched with great success. The process was much easier for entering submissions, managing them and for judges to review entries. There were some minor updates and optimizations made after the initial launch but overall the website had fulfilled the initial requirements.

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