White Cube

White Cube is a leading contemporary art gallery, with spaces in London and Hong Kong. The gallery represents the most respected established and emerging artists from across the world including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Anselm Kiefer. It is one of the first museum-quality commercial galleries in the world. Keepthinking designed and developed the new website, with the Qi CMS used for web content management.

White Cube came to Keepthinking with two goals in mind, on the one hand, to devise a strong, clear digital vision supported by a refreshed look and feel, and on the other, to develop a robust, secure system for managing collection and content. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to utilise several Keepthinking talents at the same time; including a bespoke iteration of Qi and the design and development of the website.

The design concept was in line with the gallery ethos - to provide a quiet neutral backdrop allowing the artists to take the foreground. The basic navigation sections of the site remain mainly the same as the previous website as discussed with White Cube. Overview and listing pages being are now separate to single pages, to create more visual impact for featured content and allow a clearer journey and direction for the users to experience. This gives the user smaller doses of digestible information, allowing them to focus on the page’s content without distractions.

With usability at its core, the new website includes the ability to feature and give priority to specific content and added filters and browsing tools for the user. Qi gives the White Cube team the ability to create relationships (making connections across the site to artists, exhibitions, news and shop), which results in a more satisfying browsing experience, supported by a responsive page layout with wider use of space on the page, as well as less ‘horizontal’ content more ‘vertical’, scrollable content than on the previous iteration of the website. Finally, more visible social media sharing options and sign-up to Newsletter help to raise the gallery’s digital profile.

We rationalised the organisation of information to display the audience with an overview of the exhibition, featured artworks, artist profiles and any related content, which can be navigated with an anchoring tool to easily sift through, users can add the exhibitions to calendars and share on social media.

White Cube needed an online showcase of curated works that were for sale. We provided them with a public URL section with a private log-in interface for only invited participants to be able to gain access to view and contact.