Frith Street Gallery
Originally occupying two adjacent town houses in London’s Frith Street, the gallery was established in 1989 as a forum to present the best in contemporary drawing. Expanding into a wide range of media, Frith Street gallery quickly became known for representing a distinctive group of artists working in film, photography, painting and sculpture. Frith Street Gallery currently work with 21 artists from Britain and abroad - a mixture of established and emerging figures.
The Project
Frith Street Gallery required a website that represented both their artists and the gallery itself, the essential criteria being sleek aesthetics and a system that was easy to manage. Updating their previous website had become a chore and a burden, so they approached Erskine for an overhaul which would result in the site being an investment and not a cost.
Art gallery websites
Although seemingly simple on the surface, websites for art galleries are often very complex, partly due to the large range of media that needs to be handled. Paintings, sculpture, audio and video are media types that rarely live together in such close proximity, and poor management of them is a primary cause of the many confusing and illogical gallery sites out there.
Organising this range of mixed media in a way that is both usable and beautiful is a huge challenge, and the cost of developing a CMS that is up to the task can be very expensive - sometimes expensive enough to make the project redundant when considering Return On Investment.
“When planning our new website we spoke to many companies and what stood out about Erskine Design was their perceptive understanding of our needs and their track record of strong design, something especially important to a visual arts organisation. During the project they proved themselves by creating a website that’s everything we could have hoped for in terms of design, but also a real pleasure to manage.”
Toby Kress, Frith Street Gallery
Solutions for Frith Street Gallery
Technical
When planning the Frith Street Gallery website, we analysed a number of third-party CMS’s, as well as the development of an in-house solution. Ultimately, ExpressionEngine was used as the basic platform for development, for a number of reasons:
- The whole Erskine Team being already familiar with EE at an advanced level.
- The flexibility of the ExpressionEngine templating system, and how this would easily cater for the gallery’s high aesthetic standards.
- An in-house solution, whilst certainly feasible, would not have been as cost effective
It was however clear though that the off-the-shelf ExpressionEngine system would require adjustment and extension to make it behave as we needed it to. Significant changes were made to allow complex relationships between content from different sections, the file management system was vastly improved, and the whole administration area was overhauled to improve administrative workflow.
Aesthetics
Image matters to art galleries and the artists they represent, it was imperative that Frith Street's website carried, as closely as possible, the same look and feel as their physical gallery in London. To this end, the FSG site really needed to look the part in order to be a success.
As with a lot of art gallery sites, minimalism was the order of the day, partly for ease of use, but mostly to allow the art to do the talking. As well as making use of this tried-as-tested formula, Erskine focused heavily on page composition and typography to make every page look just right. Despite the tricky business of dealing with unpredictable sizes and ratios of images and videos, the FSG site is a visual success; a well balanced and attractive example of minimalism on the web. 