Case Study: A new website for Oakfield Gallery

• The Project: Logo and website design for Kay Todman and Oakfield Gallery
• What I Did: Manage the project. Web development and coding. Install content management system.
• Result: The website was launched in February 2017.

Kay Todman, a fine art realist painter in Sussex, approached me to design and develop branding and a website for her paintings and to publicise an upcoming exhibition. The website is Oakfield Gallery.

Design

I worked with Liz Elcoate who designed the logo, website and brand guidelines. I've worked with Liz before and she always does outstanding work. In this case, it was based on a design brief that was put together with Kay.

The logo with leaf motif works really well I think. It's a clean design that has an understated elegance. Liz explains:

The oak leaf is a nod to the “oak” in the gallery name but is rendered in a slightly abstract way so that the stem of the leaf represents the tip of a paintbrush on canvas.

Web Development

One of the main objectives of the website build was to create a grid-based layout for the paintings in each gallery and a number of methods were tested. However, the final results were based on several methods depending on the page context. For example, I used CSS multiple columns for the individual gallery pages. It works well for images where the widths are known but the heights are not. It's also great for a responsive layout where the images resize and where the number of columns may change on smaller screen devices.

The page designs really highlight the paintings and I wanted to make it easy for Kay to change these as often as needed. The content management system (CMS) called Perch is ideal because it's possible to structure the content into sensible items that are easy to change. In fact, a day after a quick run-through, Kay has changed a couple of images already.

Kay has an exhibition in June and we wanted to highlight this on the home page as long as possible. So, I created a simple checkbox that 'sticks' the post (or any post) to that page. Again, it's easy for Kay to change this.

I launched the site in February 2017 and there has been some great feedback so far.