Art UK

Art UK is the digital home for the UK’s public art collections, bringing together over 300,000 artworks from museums, galleries, and civic institutions into one accessible platform. We designed and built a seamless, visually engaging website that invites users to explore, learn, and interact with Britain’s rich artistic heritage.

Results can be visualised as thumbnails, as well as on a map of the country. When searching for all paintings by Cézanne, for instance, it is immediately possible to see the number of artworks and where they are on display. The map is fully interactive and displays all participating venues that are open to the public.

With a diverse audience ranging from collectors and artists to casual art enthusiasts, understanding user needs was at the heart of our design process. We developed a comprehensive set of User Stories representing different personas. These stories were instrumental in defining the key requirements for the website, ensuring a seamless and engaging experience for all visitors.

To refine the platform before launch, we conducted extensive user testing sessions, which provided valuable real-world feedback, helping to identify and enhance usability. The insights gathered led to a series of improvements, culminating in the successful launch of a platform that truly puts its users first.

With over 44,000 artists featured, Art UK provides a comprehensive database for art lovers, students, and researchers. Our advanced filtering system allows users to explore artists by nationality, movement, or period, offering deep insights into their lives and works.

Art UK offers online visitors the possibility to register and create a profile. Registered users can save searches, create and save portfolios of artwork, and annotate individual objects.

Art UK is more than just a collection of online images—it’s a gateway to the nation’s art. The platform connects people to the artworks they own and the venues where they can experience them in person. With a comprehensive catalogue of every venue, including visitor information and direct links to artworks, Art UK bridges the digital and physical worlds, making public art truly accessible to all.

The website has gained significant public exposure, featuring in online articles and newspapers, helping to raise awareness and engagement with Art UK’s mission. Over time, we have maintained a close partnership with Art UK, continuously refining and enhancing the platform to adapt to the charity’s evolving needs and user expectations.

At the core of this ongoing success is the robust Qi CMS, which has proven to be an invaluable tool in supporting Art UK’s ambitious digitisation of public sculptures, ensuring seamless content management and long-term scalability.

A revolutionary free digital tool that allows anyone to create an online exhibition on Art UK, choosing from a database of over 230,000 paintings and sculptures by more than 40,000 artists. Anyone, anywhere can browse thousands of artworks and construct their own narratives, add commentaries and choose from a selection of display modes.

As the pandemic changed the learning landscape, Art UK's 'Learning Portal' became a pivotal addition to the Art UK website, sharing remote access to learning tools for students, teachers and the general public.

Resources in the Learning Portal can take many different forms. The key resource types were lesson plans, 3D objects, activities, videos, articles and audio pages.

Audiences will recall the old version of Tagger on the BBC 'Your Paintings' website which was retired before the launch of Art UK in 2016. Tagger's purpose is to provide their audience with an incredibly satisfying and fun way of making a valuable contribution to improving Art UK whilst seeing some great art on the way, a similar concept to a CAPTCHA system.

Tagger is a crowd-sourcing initiative in which users of Art UK are invited to tag artworks with descriptive words that help to make the works in the collection more searchable by subject matter, whilst algorithms ensure the accuracy of the tags. As a result users of Art UK are able to search for themes and topics relevant to their interests.

Tagger aims to transform the searchability of artworks on Art UK, most of which still only have small numbers of tags, whilst many have none. The previous tagger version launched 10 years ago saw over 10,000 tags added by the public, all competing to be top of the leaderboard.

Users can keep track of their personal progress in their accounts and are incentivised to continue tagging works to score on the leaderboard. In the past year Tagger has utilised the power of crowdsourcing to produce over 250,000 tags across 40,000 artworks.

An innovative and inclusive programme that seeks to transform the visual literacy skills of every child.
Focused on teaching children to interpret images, empowering them to understand the world around them.



Art UK gives everyone free digital access to the UK's national collection of art owned by the British public. On artuk.org hundreds of thousands of artworks and thousands of stories are yours to explore.

We helped Art UK to present a campaign for engaging audiences in reaching their goals for public donations, creating progressive forms that permeated throughout the website.