Brand and website for an independent publication facilitating discourse around contemporary art through publishing, programming, and events in Boston.
Services
Live Site
Collaborators
Year
Background
Boston Art Review is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization that facilitates discourse about contemporary art and culture through publishing, programming, and events in Boston and beyond. Over the course of our ongoing six year relationship, we have developed their brand identity, website, print publication templates, social media, and fundraising materials.
Brand Identity
After five years of growth and newfound status as a registered non-profit, Boston Art Review was in need of an updated visual identity. The new brand needed to feel polished and consistent for a growing audience, while maintaining a sense of the small, local community already established around the publication.
Our direction was informed by conversations with their Board, collaborators, contributors, and members of the community. Ultimately, the new brand identity maintains the spirit of community of the original logo, while giving the brand a sense of refinement, appropriate for the organization’s future.
“We most recently worked with Byse to redesign our website while also undergoing a major brand transformation. Byse worked effectively to bridge our design and technical needs into a platform that will serve our organization for years to come. Their solutions were innovative and forward thinking and their implementation was sleek and thoughtful.”
– Jameson Johnson, Founder of Boston Art Review
Site Navigation
The new website needed clarity in site hierarchy and goals, which had become muddled as the brand grew and added more touch points to their outreach. We listened to feedback from key stakeholders and community members to create primary navigation and secondary flows that matched their brand strategy and growth goals. The new site needed to make immediately clear the breadth of offerings of the publication — a weekly newsletter, digital articles, the print publication, frequent programming, and more.
From a visual perspective, we ran with the clarity yet flexibility that had been established with the new brand, bringing it to life in this new format. One of the most important things for the site was making it feel full and engaging to reflect the various offerings of the publication.
Integrated Shopping and Subscriptions
Previously, the BAR shop lived offsite on a separate domain and caused confusion when users tried to navigate between the two. We integrated shopping and editorial content into one site with a headless frontend that grabs product data from Shopify and content from WordPress. We built out functionality for purchasing issues and event ticketing.
For the last six years, the BAR team had manually managed yearly subscriptions. We migrated them to Recharge, where tracking subscriptions is made easy through automatically recurring payments. Recharge makes it simple for them to create custom email series and segments based on users subscription status.
Immersive Editorials
Reading editorials was the primary function of their old site. We redesigned the reading experience to be far more robust by creating a number of reusable components to support editorial content. This includes a slideshow, pull quotes, introductory text, author bios, and more.
Innovative Technology
The site was a custom built in React and Next.js with product management in Shopify, content management in WordPress, and subscription management in Recharge.
