Zak Group has designed and developed the website of Nottingham Contemporary, one of the UK’s largest public art institutions. Since opening in 2009 Nottingham Contemporary has welcomed over two million visitors and presented more than 50 exhibitions.

Our design concept expands upon the digital metaphor of the “page”. The new Nottingham Contemporary webpage is composed of a series of unique page types. The varying page designs divide the site visually into exhibitions, events, online resources and an e-commerce shop.

The homepage consists of a selection of current and forthcoming events, each represented by a page. With the exhibition pages we opened up the authoring experience, allowing the curatorial team to create pages that respond to the content of each exhibition. In the content management system page editors can define background colours, image layouts and variable content blocks. The user journey of the What’s On section allows visitors to intuitively navigate the institution’s extensive programming by type, day or date range. With the Record and Exchange pages, the website further extends the public engagement and research outputs, presenting Nottingham Contemporary’s research projects, curator tours, performances and lectures.

The Nottingham Contemporary front-end is built as a single page application (SPA) using Nuxt.js application framework. For the backend we used Processwire, an open-source fully-customisable headless CMS built in React.js. The shop was implemented using the Shopify e-commerce platform with a custom front-end template.