The Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery is a visual storytelling piece analyzing Bob Ross’ series The Joy of Painting.

It allows the user to explore each painting from the series in an interactive, digital art gallery. It has attracted media attention from Yahoo, Nerdist, OpenCulture, Fatherly, DesignTaxi, FlowingData and others. It also won first place in the Standalone Multimedia category at the Society for News Design’s 2021 Student Design Contest.

Tools used

I used Svelte and D3.js for all things visual and front-end. I used The Pudding’s Svelte Starter template which made configuration much easier, and made a lot of the visual aspects of the project less difficult to create (e.g. their Window component simplified resize events a ton).

For the scroll-based interactions, I used Russell Goldenberg’s Scrollama. As of the creation of this project, there is no formal or official Svelte-based scrollytelling library. I therefore used Scrollama in its vanilla form, and plugged it into the Svelte component as if I were writing normal JavaScript.

At a glance