the useful arts

Afterall, www.afterall.org, 2009.

Consultancy + website build with Content Management System + E-commerce for subscriber access.

Afterall is a contemporary art research and publishing organisation who asked to the useful arts to help to launch their redesigned website celebrating their 10th anniversary. Given the flat designs produced by AtWork we built the complete site for them, advised on best practises for some of the parts of the site that weren't yet finalised, and extended the designs as necessary.

Agri-Cultur, www.agri-cultur.eu, 2010.

Website design & build with Content Management System.

Agri-Culture is a pan-european network of organisations exploring the realtionship between Farming (Agri) and Art (Culture). This website is set up as a portal to link together like minded practitioners and to provide a space for theoretical documents on their practise to be published.

Aleksandra Mir, www.aleksandramir.info,2013

Website design & build with Content Management System.

Aleksandra Mir commisioned The Useful Arts to help take her old, self built, flat HTML website which had long been managed by her assistant, and create something that was consistent, clean and thoroughly interlinked that she could manage herself. The resultant website provides comprehensive documentation of 19 years of her work.

Almanac : www.somewhere.org.uk/almanac , 2003-2007.

Almanac is a site specific installation by Somewhere for Cinema City in Norwich, commissioned for the refurbishment of the cinema. It consists of a database of timelapse photography which dynamically generates a short film clip each day, providing a visual record of film locations across East Anglia.

The Useful Arts advised and on the systems uses for capturing digital photographs of the locations and managing the data, and built the back end database and software to dynamically generate the daily film clip, compositing the still images dynamically into a film, with surround sound. The system also uploads videos to the somewhere website where visiitors can see them blogged, or subscribe to a podcast.

avant gardening, www.avantgardening.org, 2009.

Website design & build with Content Management System.

Avant Gardening is an arts and environment project aiming with the aim to educate on the issues of how we affect and interact with the world around us. Their website is a central point on their news, project information, and a launch point to interesting things the find about similar projects.

The aesthetic of the website intends to follow that used in the fanzines they produce, producing something friendly and involved, reflecting the complexity of the issues and the simplicity of their approach at once, in a friendly, fun manner.

Ayurvedic Me, www.ayurvedic.me, 2008.

Branding, Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

Angie Fraser is Ayurvedic Practitioner at Ayurvedic Me

folkestonomy, www.folkestonomy.net, 2008.

Interactive Mapping Tool Hardware and Software Development.
Styling, Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

fugitive images, www.fugitiveimages.org.uk, 2010.

Website styling, design & build with Content Management System.

Fugitive Images is a the collaborative art practise of Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Lasse Johansen, who the useful arts worked with previously on the i am here website. For their portfolio site they wanted a simple, clean minimal site that was flexible enough to represent the various strands of their work whilst being easily self-managed.

Grizedale Arts, www.grizedale.org, 2009.

Consultancy, Styling, Website Architecture + Design + Build with Content Management System & Shop.

Part of our ongoing relationship with Grizedale Arts, this website was redeveloped to coincide with the launch of Lawson Park as the base for their residency programme. The website will extend out to allow artists-in-residence to document their work and use grizedale as a publishing platform for their research and practise.

The Useful Arts also work with Grizedale Arts providing technical direction, consultancy and support for a range of their projects. Related projects include: Lawson Park, ToadBall TV, Happy Stacking

i am here, www.iamhere.org.uk, 2009.

Graphic Design, Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

This website is an representation of Fugutive Images' 'i am here' installation at Samuel House, Haggerston, Lonodn. E8 4HN. It has been started a launching space for further documentation aobut the redeveolpment of the Haggerston estate in the coming years.

We also did the graphic design for the information boards and flyers for the launch event, and are involved in the ongoing development of the documentation.

International Village Shop, www.internationalvillageshop.net, 2010.

Website design & build with Content Management System. Design direction from Kathrin Böhm (myvillages.org/public works)

The International Village Shop is the collective documentation of the various experiments and approaches to trade that have been undertaken by Grizedale Arts, myvillages.org, public works and somewhere since 2007. The aim of the site is to further map these activities and provide centralised documentation of the activities, as well as a platform for the potential exploration of alternative models of trade on-line.

office for contemporary arts norway, www.oca.no, 2011.

Website styling, design & build with Content Management System.

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway was founded by the Norwegian government with the aim of promoting visual arts and production in Norway to an international audience, and to stimulate international exchange in the arts.

I was commissioned to help OCA transition from a flat file, hand maintained website to something 'more modern' which better reflected the scope of their work, whilst reflecting their established, restrained, aesthetic, and help to improve their publishing workflow.

My aim in the redesign of OCA.no was: to improve the ability for the various audience demographics to find the information they are looking for; to provide a framework for richer documentation of their projects; to better emphasise the wide range of international connections OCA has and is developing; to provide an improved channel for communicating their multiple activities.

The OCA.no website is part publishing platform, part database, the goal of which is to link together the various practitioners and organisations OCA work with with how they work with them, to present a transparent picture of OCAs activities at all levels. As new relationships are established, and new documentation is created, the site will unfold into it's full potential creating an evolving document of OCAs field of influence.

portland works, www.portlandworks.co.uk, 2010.

Website styling, design & build with Content Management System.

Portland Works (Sheffield, UK), built in 1877, is one of the earliest surviving examples of an integrated metal trades complex Nowadays it plays host to a wide range of crafts and arts. In 2008 the owners decided to attempt to sell it, displacing many of the tenants and risking the survival of some of the skills acted out there. The tenants decided to group together and now plan to buy the building and run it as a co-operative.

In 2010 the useful arts were commisioned by Sheffield University to re-design their campaign website to better present the story and to act as a platform for fund raising and promotion. The site is built to be easily managed by the team there and to be able to provide a rich document of a space with a rich history and a hopeful future.

public works, www.publicworksgroup.net, 2010.

Website design & build with Content Management System.

public works are an art & architecture practise working within and towards public space.

We created this website in collaboration with the team to allow them to move away from an in-house site built using DreamWeaver with Wordpress blogs, to something more dynamic that would allow all of the team members to manage their own projects within a content management system, and provide better interlinking between their works.

This project is part of an ongoing relationship with public works that includes Folkestonomy, Colchester Inn, International Village Shop and DIY Regeneration.

Rhyzom, www.rhyzom.net, 2010.

Website design & build with Content Management System.

Rhyzom is a collaborative network initiated by Atelier d'architecture autogérée to explore local cultural production and translocal dissemination.

The Rhyzom.net website was developed to allow the participants to document their activities and projects as part of the network, and to show the complex set of connections between participants activities and outcomes, growing over time. Part document, part map, the website design merges navigation into structure to represent the rhizomatic nature of the network.

rip it up and start again, www.ripitupandstartagain.org, 2011.

Website design & build with Content Management System.

Rip It Up and Start Again is a series of lectures on architecture and the city, curated by Robert Mull and Kieran Long of London Met Architecture and Spatial Design to place the work of the school in relation to broader debates about the city.

the useful arts were engaged to develop a living archive which documented the talks and presentations in a dynamic way, whilst keeping the strong visual identity that had been developed for the print materials promoting the lectures, and providing a space where visitors could leave their own annotations to the talks.

Rona Lee, www.ronalee.org, 2009.

Styling, Website Architecture, Design + Build with Content Management System.

Rossi & Rossi, www.rossirossi.com, 2010.

Website design & build with Content Management System.

Rossi & Rossi are an art gallery specialising in contemporary and classical Asian artworks.

The Useful Arts were commissioned to update their out dated web presence, providing a new site design and improved visibility of exhibition, artworks and artist information, to provide a cleaner, clearer experience with the focus on the artworks that they represent.

Simon Rose, www.simonrose.org, 2006.

Styling, Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

slade school of fine art, www.ucl.ac.uk/slade, 2012

Website styling, design, front end build & integration with UCL systems.

The Useful Arts were initially commisioned to help guide the architecture and implementation of the Slade website to bring the look and feel, and content, up to date, working on top of a CMS, and to better integrate with UCL branding and services. After an an initial discovery and consultation period we were also asked to create the website design working to create a 'riff' on the UCL branding, complementing it whilst also playing with the core ideals and general implementation.

The site build involved integrating with UCL's CMS of choice, Silva, as well as creating an extra media database and integration into services provided across UCL, such as IRIS - UCL's Institutional Research Information System - to create rich staff profiles. Additional components for the site were developed using the Kohana PHP framework.

Sometime Later

Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

Somewhere, www.somewhere.org.uk, 2003 - present.

Installation Development.
Styling, Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

Somewhere artists Pope+Guthrie won the Northern Art Prize in 2007.

Spatial Agency, www.spatialagency.net, 2009.

Consultancy + website & database design & build with Content Management System.

Spatial Agency is a research project initiated by Agency, part of Sheffield University School of Architecture, looking at alternative architecture practises, their interconnection and influences.

The first part of this project has involved creating a database structure to allow them to document and connect the various important practises, both as a research tool for publication of a book and as an extra resource, providing ongoing documentation of projects that can't be featured in the book.

The second part of the project will be a mapping of the interactions and influences of the various parties featured practices.

the floating cinema, www.floatingcinema.info, 2011

Website styling, design and build with content management system.

The Floating Cinema was commissioned by UP Projects as part of their Portavilion series of mobile public event spaces. For the 2011 Portavilion somewhere and Studio Weave decided to create a cinema on a converted barge that would roam the waterways of East London, including areas around the new Olympic Development.

somewhere wanted a website to better reflect what they were trying to achieve than the existing portavilion website, that would offer them a space to document their process as well as the events, and give them a space to post films of the events thereafter. From this I developed the idea of orientating the site around a map of the waterways involved, styling it to give visual emphasis to this oft overlooked back bone of London's past. This also created a spatial snapshot of events and where the influences for the project come from. Blog posts come via mobile phone allowing the embedded GPS data to used to attach the images to the map.

Over the course of the project an additional record of the events will be created, turning the site from a promotional tool and booking mechanism into a full archive of the events.

the wire, www.thewire.co.uk, 2012

Website Development with CMS and E-Commerce.

The Useful Arts were commisioned to help The Wire take their existing website, along with 7 years of data posted into their previous CMS, and upgrade it to a new, more dynamic, format. The new site gives them more control over how content is featued and interlinked, improves the quality of their content management system, and provides an overhauled shop system. The new site serves as a starting point for the future development of The Wire's online development, allowing them to update and adapt more quickly.

Graphic Design by Ben Weaver

ToadBall TV, www.toadball.tv, 2008.

Installation Development. Interactive Desigin and Development.
Website Design + Build with Content Management System.

What Will The Harvest Be?, www.whatwilltheharvestbe.com, 2009.

Consultancy, Website Architecture + Design + Build with Content Management System.

A website created for somewhere to document their urban community vegetable garden in Stratford, London. The intention of the webiste was to create a window onto the garden, documenting the background to the project and to provide a place where the process and experiences of growing could be documented, though a database of plants with user annotations, a blog, and a webcam producing an interactive timelapse.

The website design is based upon the original print design fro the project created by Linda Byrne.