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Art Gallery, London
Website design and maintenance
+ the
client
+ the
brief
+ our
approach
+ developing
the site
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THE CLIENT: ®edux
Unit 303, Third Floor, Lana House
116 Commercial Street
London E1 6NF
Started in 2003 by Peter Lewiss, Makiko Nagaya and Simon Gee,
the gallery hosts events, seminars and exhibitions for challenging,
experimental and contemporary art.
Peter Lewis was nominated for a Hamlyn Foundation award in
2004 and ®edux has been
nominated for an Arts Foundation Award 2004-2005.
THE BRIEF: The website would
require simple styling features, that incorporated ®edux'
visual identity.
The site would comprise numerous and often lengthy articles
or press releases, which would in some cases, be accompanied
by photos. Additional pages for contacting and locating the
gallery were needed.
The site would also hold a large variety of photos of events
and artists' work, which would be made available to visitors
through an online gallery.
OUR APPROACH: In a meeting
with Peter and Makiko at ®edux
in summer '04, we discussed the requirements of the gallery
for a website. The aim of this meeting was to understand what
®edux required of their
site, what they needed it to do for them, and most importantly,
who their target audience would be.
At the meeting we also discussed styles that Peter and Makiko
liked personally, and established that the overall style for
the website should reflect the gallery's philosophy of reduction.
We scrutinised books and magazines that used design that Peter
and Makiko admired, we also looked up old Blue Note record
sleeves and talked about the treatment of the website's online
gallery images.
Over the course of the meeting, a set of visual themes were
compiled and ideas for design rules were formulated: how to
use images within the text; the use of space for text; the
use of negative space; good colours to use and colours to
avoid. These ideas formed the kernel upon which development
would be started.
DEVELOPMENT: The site's
primary content would relate to the events and exhibitions
held at ®edux. As such,
the Events index became the linchpin of the site's simple
architecture, with the Guests & Artists index supplementing
the features and press releases, acting as a directory for
the site.
Graphical features were kept to an absolute minimum, so that
visitors' attention would be focussed on the site's text,
which explains the background to and purpose of each event.
Visitors to the site, generally accustomed to articles such
as these, would have nothing to distract them from the narrative
that the articles provided.
To maximise the appeal of page after page of pure text,
that offered nothing else in the way of visual flamboyance
to distract readers, the
text itself would be treated in a way that made it stand out.
In a novel deviation from conventional body-text
style, ®edux'
page text would incorporate the logo-colour
into all of the site's
punctuation. Not so much
that it would distract from the writing,
but just enough that it would noticeably tint the page.
®edux, London
www.reduxprojects.org.uk
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