Byte Studios

Websites and brands for museums, libraries and nonprofits

Byte Studios is a web, interactive and branding studio in Milwaukee that calls itself mission-driven and says it measures its business by social impact. Its work is concentrated on cultural institutions, libraries, nonprofits and what it terms progressive businesses, and its site is organized around four verbs: connecting people with arts organizations, advocating for movements that matter to nonprofits, illustrating the energy of libraries through digital features, and helping businesses grow into more independent, brand-forward operations.

ByteCMS and the way a project runs

Sites are built on the studio's own content management system, ByteCMS, and the studio states that every website it makes is fully unique. A project is described as a sequence of stages that begins with discovery and content strategy, moves through comparative and industry research, and ends with going live and ongoing support. The first step is deliberately open-ended: the team describes itself as a guide through the digital landscape and prefers to talk with the people running an organization and ask broad questions, whether in a brainstorming meeting or over a few phone calls.

What the studio builds

The list of services is broad. It includes website design and development, API design and development, search and discovery systems, data dashboards and visualizations, and touchscreen and kiosk applications for galleries and similar spaces. Alongside these it offers brand identity and style guides, user experience design, design systems that work inside the content management system, and proofs of concept for applications. It also covers application security and privacy, a subject that recurs in its blog, which has discussed domain name safety and a ransomware attack at a national library.

Examples from the cultural sector

Projects the studio highlights include an online experience for the Listening to Mitchell archive, a Milwaukee Public Library project whose challenge was ordering a large pile of material so the public could explore it without being overwhelmed. Another is a testing module built as a small standalone product inside ByteCMS for the Walters Art Museum, turning a plain test document into an interactive piece. It has also worked with the Charles Allis Art Museum, the Villa Terrace Art Museum, the Mechanics' Institute and the Roselle Public Library.

Accessibility and public-interest topics

The studio writes about accessibility and takes a position on one common shortcut: its blog advises against accessibility overlays on websites. It has also written about brand for nonprofits and about film and technology ethics, for example a piece on a documentary about bias in facial recognition shown at a Milwaukee film festival. These pieces give a picture of the values the firm says guide its work.