Littlewood Art Website - Case Study
Jill Littlewood is a paper and book artist with a career that spans fifty years. Her work is political, evocative, expressive and organic. She's also a dear family friend. Late last year she reached out to me after receiving one of my newsletters (sign up here!) She was working on an idea for a new collaborative project dealing with colorism using the medium of handmade books in different shades of brown. She wanted to create a website to house all of the content for the project.
THE PROBLEM
We talked and fleshed out the project and the objectives of the website. After reviewing Jill’s objectives, I realised she didn’t need a separate website. What she really needed was re-design (and re-platforming) of her existing website. This project, which was named Big Bad Beautiful Brown, would not be Jill’s last big idea or collaboration. What would happen with the next project, would she come to me wanting to build a new website for that? No.
THE FIX
What Jill needed was an easy-to-update and flexible website that could easily showcase dynamic content, meaning content that is updated regularly. The first step would be to move the site from a complicated-to-update, non-hosted Wordpress site to a hosted Squarespace site.
The new site contained space above the fold for a hero image and content about her latest project, immediately leading the user to a project landing page via a call to action button. Beneath the hero image, and still higher up on the site, was space for a feed of the latest blog posts associated with the project. We used tags so Jill could easily mark posts related to the Big Bad Beautiful Brown to show up on the home page, while others appeared solely under the ‘blog’ navigation.
In addition to galleries showcasing Jill’s work, we created a dedicated landing page for all projects. As soon as any future projects starts, new content can take it’s place on the home page, and the previous project will move to it’s final home on the projects page and in a gallery accessible further down on the home page.
I also helped Jill work out a basic Instagram strategy. We updated her Instagram profile and figured out a hashtag for the project (#bbbeautifulbrown). As soon as a critical mass of UCG (user generated content) from project collaborators appears under the hashtag, we’ll add a hashtag specific feed on the project landing page.
I encourage you to not only take a look at the site, but also the Big Bad Beautiful Brown project. It’s a perfect project to take part in during this time of lockdowns and physical distancing.
In short, Jill has created handmade books and will send them to you to alter as you please. You can share the results on Instagram using the #bbbeautifulbrown hashtag. It doesn’t matter if your new to book arts or an old hand. Jill put together a book arts resource page for the ages here.
Working with Jill was really a pleasure. The subject matter was interesting, it was collaborative and it was thrilling to bring her vision to life. Here’s what she had to say when the first iteration of the site came into being:
“It was so exciting to go to Squarespace I had to jump up and get a handful of cookies and dance around. I can really see how the shape is materializing and it feels like birth. Being a real/cool digital person is not something I ever thought
I'd want but, like a shower on a hot day or a really well fitted, pretty dress, it has an amazing
impact on my sense of self. ”
- JILL LITTLEWOOD, PAPER & BOOK ARTIST
This is the kind feedback a web designer lives for! Thanks so much Jill.