The Illustration Room

The Illustration Room WordPress website was initially developed in 2012. The site had an extensive blog and a large portfolio of artists and their work, so there was a certain amount of legacy content and code.

Hosted on a custom VPS with a custom CDN hosted with Amazon Web Services, the site was technically sophisticated. Ideally the process was to completely redevelop and redesign the website without having to recreate the years of content that already existed.

The site features a complete redesign; responsive styles work across devices and screen aspect ratios, providing the best viewing experience for users, with particular attention paid to art directors and creative professionals who may be viewing the dozens of portfolios and hundreds of images on larger screens. The client was heavily involved in the design process and it retains the clean monochrome style of the former site but with updated typefaces, better use of screen size, and masonry grids.

The WordPress admin was updated with improved use of custom post types, archive pages, custom taxonomies on posts and attachments, and the use of custom fields to ensure every aspect of the site is editable.

Custom functions were developed to make it as easy as possible to maintain and edit, especially when dealing with artist images, animated GIFs and videos.

An e-commerce component has also been added to the site using WooCommerce. The site now sells a range of products (affiliate, simple and variant products) with a simple clean interface that follows the site aesthetic.

The site can also be used to promote exhibitions featuring represented artists.