Frieze
magazine is Europe’s no.1 art magazine, est. 1991, and the Frieze Art Fair Europe’s biggest art fair, est. 2002. Erskine established what has become a very strong ongoing relationship with Frieze in March 2007. We were asked to completely rethink, redesign and redevelop their online presence across the two existing websites and a third new site, ensuring all three were able to share resources and be managed from one panel. The websites were relaunched in September 2007.
- frieze magazine was set up in 1991 and is the leading magazine of contemporary art and culture. frieze is published eight times a year and includes essays, reviews and columns by today's most forward-thinking writers, artists and curators.
- Frieze Art Fair takes place every October in Regent’s Park, London. It features over 150 of the most exciting contemporary art galleries in the world. The fair also includes specially commissioned artists' projects, a prestigious talks programme and an artist-led education schedule.
- Frieze Foundation is a non-profit organisation established in 2003 and is responsible for the curated programme at Frieze Art Fair, comprising artist commissions, talks, films, music and education. Frieze Foundation is funded by the European Commission’s Culture 2007 programme.
We began with a rigorous development process, managing a client team of around forty people in three countries. The scale of the task was daunting, with sixteen years of badly-formatted magazine archives, five years of art fair data and an existing subscriber database. Using our ExpressionEngine experience, we soon established a flexible site structure, running all three sites from one control panel. Visitors can easily search across all three domains from any one site.
Of special interest to both ourselves and also the magazine team is the fostering of the online community. Its not easy for readers to interact with a physical magazine, but online we have been able to open up space for comment, discussion and feedback, and we have implemented a number of user tools such as article bookmarking and access privileges based on magazine subscription and web-only registration.
Paper and Pixels
Frieze themselves understand the importance of the magazine and website operating in tandem, and that the two compliment each other. To simply repurpose content for the web would be a wasted opportunity.
Thus, articles in print are enhanced online through associated audio and video, and each physical issue makes space in it’s contents to outline the additional material to be found on the website. This content is balanced by fresh online-only reviews and commentary commissioned from the finest arts writers.
Shop, subscriptions and advertising
“Frieze is a dream client, and we’re passionate about protecting and evolving the Frieze brand online through regular evaluation, which can involve realigning the design and rethinking the content in line with usage.”
The main CMS is carefully combined with a totally bespoke subscription and e-commerce system we designed and built especially for Frieze. The new system easily handles irregular issue dates, standard payment methods and also direct debits, with configurable reporting and exports. Its also used to sell numerous Frieze publications and art fair tickets.
We implemented a robust advert server to handle unique campaigns and collate detailed statistics for advertisers. Both custom and traditionally-sized advertising campaigns needed to be planned for and created as autonomous zones around the websites.
Other tasks included interaction with Filemaker databases, and the provision of audio/video tools, and podcast subscription via iTunes and traditional RSS.
Glen
Simon
