A new and revived online presence
May 2023 – Ongoing
My role
I was the sole UX designer/ UI developer for this project. I worked within the Artenal CMS to create a clean, easy to use art gallery business interface.
The challenge
Richard Beavers is an art gallery owner who focuses on Black and Black diaspora fine art and installations. I was approached by him and his team to re-invision their online presence and give them greater control of artist and artwork content, exhibitions, and art fairs.
The client wanted to move away from the Artsy platform so I was tasked with searching for a suitable CMS that could support light UI customization and eventual expansion to online selling, while keeping the site responsive and easy to use for clients not used to interacting with the gallery online.
The original gallery page on the Artsy owned platform. Not very visual or helpful in
explaining the gallery’s style and mission.
Research and Discovery
The first part of the project involved doing research on which CMS platform would be suitable. I did a competitive analysis of the top platforms in the gallery and e-commerce space and created a diagram that explained the pros and cons of each.
I also interviewed the gallery owner, the gallery assistant, and a top client to get a sense of their goals for a new site and some pain points around the existing Artsy experience.
Design Process
The primary objective of this design was to make it highly scannable and easily navigated, which is crucial for gallery websites with a lot of art and exhibitions (and two separate locations). Another goal was to make it look modern, elegant, simple and engaging so that it would catch the user’s eye.
So, the general design approach featured the following points:
- Focusing on a color palette of clean colors, with a light neutral background and bright contrastive color accents
- A combination of typefaces that together would keep a good balance of brand recognition and readability
- A responsive grid that would allow for flexible layouts across devices and browsers
- A way for users to quickly scan the site for artworks and exhibitions without encountering too much friction
Based on that, I created three separate branding guidelines for the client to choose from:
Brand theme Immersive – vivid contrasting colors, bold sans font usage, large full screen imagery
Brand theme Clean & Bright – soft colors, sans serif font, masonry grid for visual variety
Brand theme Simple & Sophisticated – neutral colors, proxima nova font for accessibility and
body text readability, tighter grid to see more artworks at once
The right CMS
After comparing the various platforms and discussing pros and cons with stakeholders, we decided to move forward with Artlogic, as this CMS had the type of features needed at this stage – Artenal integration, out of the box functionality with exhibition set up and individual artwork inquiry. This platform also had features that would help the gallery expand online as the project progressed, such as storefronts and virtual gallery integration.
Following the agreement, we discussed the type of content desired for phase 1 of the site. I created a series of wireframes to demonstrate the type of user flows and layout that would provide minimal friction for navigating a lot of content and draw user’s eyes towards visual interest across the pages.
Testing with stakeholders
I conducted usability testing sessions with the stakeholders to validate whether the layout presented would be suitable for the gallery at this stage.
During the session, I observed how they interacted with the prototype. The usability session revealed that there were too many categories, and that having the site in different languages was far out of scope for our MVP. I decided to combine the exhibition categories with fairs and remove news altogether for the time being.
While working on the high fidelity design, I was also tasked to create email templates – this provided an opportunity to visually implement my suggested branding themes and get input before moving forward with the full theme online:
Email designs using the branded themes explored
Going live
After finalizing the layout and getting buy-in for the winning branding option – we went with “Simple and Sophisticated” – it was time to finalize the design and push the site live. I needed to get the site up and running for Art Basel 2023, as the client needed the site to attract business and generate interest for the gallery with a simple yet lux web experience:
Learnings and next steps
Overall, the launch was a success – since the new website is live on a branded platform instead of a more generic Artsy one, the gallery has seen a 15% increase of visits to the site and a large increase of enquiries around artworks. Since there is interest from users around online art buying, I would like to push for online selling for the gallery as I think this would lead to even more engagement with the client off and online.