Little Blue Gallery
Turning an artist's craft into a business
Project Overview
The purpose of this project was to build a website that has artist values (acting as a virtual gallery) while being a place she could sell merchandise as well as advertise classes in the future.
What is the Little Blue Gallery?
The Little Blue Gallery, is a small gallery located in the Blue Mountains headed by a local artist who creates oil paints. This artist loved in her community aspires to expand her art business selling merchandise, classes and to reach a wider audience.
Contributions
Research, UI Design, Web Development & CMS
Timeline
Research and Consulting with client: 2 Weeks
Wireframing and designing: 2 Weeks
Development: 5 Weeks
Wireframing and designing: 2 Weeks
Development: 5 Weeks
After analysing the competition, I struggled to synthesis useful trends between artist's sites, most favouring abstraction over practicality, almost all failed from an ease of use perspective. Most competitors struggled with showcasing artworks with prominent real estate while being uncluttered and user friendly. Instead I relied on comparative analysis and drew inspiration from art galleries themself and emulated the art gallery experience.
Competitive and Comparative Analysis
Drawing on my comparative analysis, the primary goal was to give the client's artworks prominent real estate, to emulate an art gallery and to provide unique allure to match the artists style.
Being a UX designer and Web developer I could use my interdisciplinary abilities to incorporate ambitious functionality into my wireframes. Being a web developer I knew the limitations and abilities of my web-dev software.
I decided to make the site a one page site with a stationary navbar on the left. This not only highlights displaying the artworks which is the primary goal for the site, it also allows users to easily view a large number of her artworks quickly, decreasing the exit rate.
Initial Wireframing
Final Designs
To develop the site I used webflow, the same platform used to develop this portfolio. I chose this for its wide functionality, CMS integration and potential ecommerce functionality.
The artist wanted an ability to sell merchandise and her classes in the future, so I also integrated an ecommerce system that she could publish at anytime in the future.
Rather than manually inputting her artworks as images, I integrated all artworks and products and developed the site responsively with a CMS system so she could add more artworks later or remove them easily herself as well as adjusting basic information, which would all update seamlessly in the site.
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In accordance with my designs, I developed a one page site with a stationary navbar. Considering the site is quite content heavy, this was perfect for optimisation as I could progressively load all the images and pages before the user had a chance to scroll down.
Finally amogst other integrations I added a booking service for the artist's class workshop to be enabled at the artist's volition.
Web Development and CMS
Checkout the live website at