The Nall Institute.

Overview

The Nall Institute at Troy University preserves the legacy of Fred Nall Hollis — the Alabama-born artist who trained under Salvador Dalí at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and who spent a career painting, sculpting, designing opera sets and laying mosaics across Europe and the United States. Craxinno delivered the museum website design and the full production build. The brief was unusual: most cultural institution sites are archives, but this one had to feel like Nall's work — layered, restless, generous — while still selling merchandise, respecting an estate's approvals, and shipping to a fixed launch date.

The Design Approach

Nall painted in dense, saturated layers, so a flat scrolling page would have undersold him. We built the site around scrollytelling. Sections pin while content animates over them. Artwork moves in parallax at different depths. Sequences scrub forward and backward with the scroll wheel rather than firing once and finishing. A horizontal track turns vertical scroll input into a sideways gallery walk. GSAP ScrollTrigger drives the choreography and Lenis smooths the scroll itself, so motion reads as inertia instead of mechanics. Every effect had to earn its place — reveal a work, pace a story beat, or get cut.

What We Built

The frontend is custom Next.js, React and Tailwind CSS, with no page-builder shortcuts. Commerce runs headless: Shopify's Storefront API powers the Boutique catalogue, and the Customer Account API acts as a single sign-on across shopping, chat and image generation, so a visitor authenticates once and carries that session everywhere.

Two AI experiences sit on top. A-EYE Nall is a retrieval-augmented chatbot that answers in the artist's first-person voice, drawing only from a verified corpus of his words — with a deliberate boundary: ask it what it is, and it answers honestly as an AI rather than staying in character. The AI Studio runs FLUX with a style-LoRA trained on Nall's visual language, letting visitors create work in his idiom. Both were built under estate oversight covering persona, voice consent and sensitive subject matter.

Pages We Designed

Home with a rotating navigation ring, About, Pavilions with the Renaissance Montgomery pavilion, Curated Exhibitions covering Alice in Wonderland and Nall Remnant, the Boutique, Chat & Create, AI Studio, Blog, Contact, and a full Accessibility statement alongside Terms and Privacy. See more of this kind of work on our projects page and across the design wall.

Key Outcomes

One identity across three systems. Shopify's Customer Account API removed the usual problem of a shop login, a chat login and a tool login living in separate silos — the visitor sees one account, and application data keys cleanly to the Shopify customer ID.

Motion that serves the art. The animation vocabulary was agreed with the client before a line of it was written, so scroll behaviour was a design decision rather than a late-stage effect.

AI with guardrails, not gimmicks. The persona is bounded, the corpus is verified, and the estate signed off before launch — which is what makes it safe to put an artist's voice on a public site at all.

If you're planning something similar for a museum, gallery or foundation, start here or talk to us. More case studies live in the showcase.