Well known in the artists circles for its picturesque landscapes and strong traditions in art, Newlyn – the birthplace of the famous Forbes School of Painting – has recently started to shine even more vibrantly, as the Newlyn School of Art announced its grand opening.

As we’ve always been tempted by charismatic projects, the commission of this particular one was a nice opportunity for our team to create a beautiful web site and we did our best in making it work just in time for the start of the new school year.

The sketches

The fellows from Newlyn were quite positive about the main outlines of the project, so we were given the basic colours and the freedom to draw. They needed an impressive web site to bring forward the birth of a new Newlyn painting school, yet simple and functional, clearly declaring the commitment of the founders to create a constructive artistic and educational environment.

The website would promote different art courses, and was supposed to maintain online payment for a list of items – courses and gift vouchers.

Having this raw picture in mind, the MTR Design team got to work

The content management system is the heart of each website so it was of great importance and a stepping stone for the whole project. This was the canvas of our painting and we crafted it so that it would fit the special requirements of Newlyn School of Arts. Finishing the grounds of the site we added some extra features – a fully functional online shop with integrated payment system, newsletter and connection to social media as Facebook and Twitter, as well as interactive calendar of the courses showing their starting date, duration and type – a real functional info graphic.

Next step in the project was creating the design. We kept it simple, so the main educational purpose of the site could stand out. The minimalistic background brings the main colours of the various courses to the foreground and make focusing on the certain item easy and prompt.

And the results?

Check out yourself on http://www.newlynartschool.co.uk/

We wish all the tutors and students to be best luck and loads of inspiration and hope that we’ll be soon hearing from the Newlyn painting school.

How did we handle it?

In short – what we did:

  • Design concept;
  • E-commerce shopping cart platform;
  • Payment system integration (WorldPay);
  • Development of the HTML/CSS layouts for the website;
  • Custom content management system;
  • Newsletter module.