Erskine Design

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, and is the biggest of its kind in Europe. The fair also includes specially commissioned artists’ projects, a prestigious talks programme and an artist-led education schedule.

One of three website we created concurrently for Frieze in 2007, the FAF website was perhaps the most complex. Firstly, the website has to easily adapt to the lengthy art fair planning schedule and steady release of public and press info each year. Secondly, the website had to be flexible enough to contain varying content for each year’s fair within a few simple sections. Thirdly, it was necessary to create a bridge between Frieze’s internal Filemaker database of galleries and artists and repurpose that data for the online art fair yearbook pages with simple export/import tools.

It was also important that the FAF website act in tandem with the new Frieze Foundation website, the latter reflecting artists’ projects, talks, music, film and educational events. The primary goal is to encourage users to move between the two websites freely without becoming disoriented.

Every year the art fair’s visual identity and general focus evolves, and the next step is to rework the website even more to allow it to better compliment these changes, the website itself a declarative reflection of each annual fair.

“Frieze’s brief for Erskine was certainly daunting: three interlinked websites that would comprise frieze magazine, Frieze Art Fair, as well as the non-profit organization Frieze Foundation. Erskine handled this major-scale task excellently, creating three sites that incorporate a large archive and various functionalities into an attractively minimal design.”
Sam Thorne, Online Editor

Related Case Study: Frieze