Art UK Website & CMS

Art UK is the online home for all public art collections in the United Kingdom. Working in partnership with over 3,000 public collections and other organisations including the BBC, this cultural education charity displays a free online gallery of a growing number of artworks including painting and public sculpture. Keepthinking was chosen to design and build the website portal, with the Qi CMS used to support the large database as well as being used for website content management.

Building on the success of the Your Paintings project, developed for Art UK in partnership with the BBC, Keepthinking was commissioned to design a website and CMS with a digital asset management system to manage the growing database of over 200,000 artworks, a ‘Collection Portal’ interface for participating collections to manage, exchange and share their collection content, and third-party integration with tools such as APIs.

A fully-responsive, functional and accessible website. Designed to be highly user-friendly, Art UK benefits from many different useful features to assist a broad range of audiences. Taking advantage of the brand designed by Pentagram, it benefits from achieving a refined and mature aesthetic, while being practical and sensitive to the content it displays.

A comprehensible selection of relationships helps to navigate and guide the user to engage with the project further. The flow of the site enables the user to explore as much detail around a subject as they want. The user is able to seamlessly journey through and discover related artists, artworks, venues, topics and stories.

As the audience base for Art UK is very broad, ranging from collectors and artists to anyone interested in art, user personas guided our design decisions. Art UK and the Art UK Steering Panel developed a comprehensive list of User Stories for each of the personas that were subsequently reviewed and were key on setting out key user requirements for the website.

Before the website was publicly released several user testing sessions were run with members of the public. At this stage, people were interacting with a fully working website and thus were able to provide more accurate feedback. Following the evaluation of the results, agreed improvements on usability between Art UK and Keepthinking led to the launch of the website.

Results can be visualised as thumbnails, as well as on a map of the country. When searching for all paintings by Cézanne, for instance, it is immediately possible to see the number of artworks and where they are on display. The map is fully interactive and displays all participating venues that are open to the public.

Users can perform searches to explore over 44,000 artists whose works feature in the UK's national collection – or view all of them in a grid. These searches can be filtered for nationality as well as styles. Short artist biographies are provided by Oxford University Press, while public library cardholders users can access longer biographies from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Grove Art Online. There are also links to artist biographies on Wikipedia, when available. Artists are linked to venues and artworks.

The website has benefited from exposure to the public through online articles and newspapers. Over time, we have worked in close collaboration with Art UK, tweaking and improving the site as the charity and the user’s preferences changed. The robust Qi CMS has proven a great tool to support the ongoing digitisation project of public sculpture.

Art UK offers online visitors the possibility to register and create a profile. Registered users can save searches, create and save portfolios of artwork, and annotate individual objects.