A hundred years of plants, finally searchable
Turning drawers of pressed specimens and handwritten ledgers into an archive people browse for fun.
- Client
- Verdant Botanical Archive
- Location
- Sintra, Portugal
- Year
- 2024
- Disciplines
- Digital archive, Interface design, Development
Chapter 01
The brief
The archive held more than forty thousand specimens and a century of field notes, but researchers had to book a visit to see any of it. The goal was a public archive that served scientists without scaring everyone else away.
Chapter 02
The idea
We designed two doors into the same collection: a precise search for researchers, and a wandering mode that lets curious visitors drift from one plant to its neighbours by colour, season or the botanist who collected it.
Chapter 03
The result
The archive now welcomes visitors from more than a hundred countries every month, and wandering mode is where most of them spend their time.
- Specimens digitised and searchable
- 40k
- Countries visiting each month
- 100+
- Average time spent wandering
- 7 min
Rigorous with the data, generous with ideas. Teo turned a century of records into something people browse for fun, and our researchers love it too.
Credits
- Interface design and development
- Teo Valdane
- Digitisation
- Archive volunteers
- Botanical advice
- The curatorial team
