CollyLogic: Frith Street Gallery

Frith Street Gallery

9th October 2008

Another week, another launch. We got blisters on our fingers. Erskine was asked to redesign and rebuild the website for the renowned Frith Street Gallery, now based just behind Piccadilly Circus in central London. To be quite frank, most top-end gallery sites are rubbish and desperately outdated, so we relished the opportunity to rethink this one. Read on for more…

Several months in the making, the challenge was not only to keep the artists happy (not easy, I assure you) but chiefly to produce a minimal design with carefully chosen typography, marrying this to very complex back-end EE work making use of numerous relational links between artists, exhibitions, works and so on. Top work from Jamie to get the visual ball rolling, with Greg moving it forward, and Glen helming the relentless reshaping of the back-end via many of his custom EE mods and plugs.

I’m a big fan of the way the dual horizontal menus are dealt with. If you delve into an artists’ section, you get a new sub-nav, but to balance things out the main-nav has it’s contrast turned right down so as to avoid two competing nav bars. Its quite a deep site, and there’s a surprising amount of detail and laboursome thinking going on despite the initially minimal feel. Just what we love!

Since opening in 1989 Frith Street Gallery has developed a programme of exhibitions by artists working in a wide range of media from drawing and painting to film, video and installation. The gallery currently represents a group of 22 artists from Britain and abroad as well as collaborating with others on specific projects.

Hope you like it.

Simon Collison published this on 09/10/08, at 11:34 PM

Comments

Top notch work as usual guys. I’m currently working on a project with dual horizontal navigation. Very impressive.

10/10 at 01:28 from Jacob Fentress

Post a message in the forum if you’d like more detail on how to do either.

10/10 at 11:30 from Anny

Ah, this is so nicely done. The artists and their work are the star of the show; the site design itself fades into the background and doesn’t overpower, and “just” smoothly does its work. Yet somehow the gallery doesn’t get short shrift at all, but shows up as the foundation, as it should. Perfect balance. I like the navigation very much, too.

10/10 at 15:30 from Carolyn

Absolutely wonderful!!! The artwork was amazing and so was the complete design of it all!! It took my breath away.

10/10 at 18:19 from Michele Antionette

Lovely work.

13/10 at 17:42 from Colin Devroe

Great site and I know how hard these sites are as I’ve just completed a Modern Art gallery site.

I especially love the jQuery AJAX gallery Still trying to get my head around how you coded the single entry page that is pulls from.