2005 Redesign

The redesign of the Cather Archive, which was unveiled in the winter of 2005, takes its color scheme from Cather's work. Specifically, the charcoal gray, terra cotta, and beige colors were taken from a photograph of ancestral Puebloan pottery, the pottery that inspired one of Cather's most compelling and well-known articulations of the creative process in her 1915 novel, The Song of the Lark:

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

The green on the site is taken from summer prairie grass, referenced often in Cather's Nebraska novels. We believe the choice of colors and the austere design evoke the work and sensibility of Cather, who noted that "the higher processes of art are all processes of simplification."