Artsmark

Artsmark (www.artsmark.org.uk) is an Arts Council England-led programme, in partnership with the Department for Education, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and Ofsted, that awards schools, further education colleges and youth justice settings a gold, silver or bronze award for the quality of their arts provision.

The site requirements were to design a new website identity for Artsmark, and migrate it from a bespoke CMS that was proving unmaintainable and inflexible, to a modern platform.

Over a series of iterations, we developed the site from user requirements into wireframes through to a visual design that represents both the Arts Council brand identity guidelines and Artsmark’s distinct positioning, by combining a new autumnal colour palette and playful imagery with existing brand typography.

After a content audit showed that almost all content had to be rewritten, we prepared the new information architecture for a manual content import. We built the site with the Drupal 7 CMS, and introduced new editor functionality such as CMS-generated image slideshows, automatic image resizing, WYSIWYG editing and form creation, and user functionality such as log ins for assessors and trainers, comments and social media integration.