House of Illustration

House of Illustration is the world's first gallery dedicated to the art of illustration in all its forms, opened in 2014 in London and founded by Sir Quentin Blake. Its exhibition programme explores illustration from around the world, celebrating its rich and varied history and championing emerging talent. At Keepthinking, we were lucky enough to be selected to design and develop a website for the then-new museum, powered by our Collections Management System, Qi, which is also used for web content management.

The goals of the website project were to become the number one site for illustration, attracting audiences to exhibitions and events; to target the general public, students and teachers in order to get them to contribute to the project and promote the creative vision of House of Illustration. On top of that, the website should be easy to manage and able to deal with a variety of content types.

The website is targeted towards 3 user groups, the general public with an interest in illustration, students studying illustration and teachers. Therefore, learning resources are a key part of the site.

Navigation is lead by actions (‘Get involved’, ‘Learn & participate’) encouraging users to engage with the site, while all sections are led by illustrated images.

Events and exhibitions showcasing the work of the many world-famous illustrator trustees and friends are the key offerings of the HoI. The What's On section was paramount to the success of the project and the ability to sell tickets from the start crucial.

The House can create tickets, including limited availability ones for each event and exhibition in the programme. Tickets may also include Gift Aid donations and are processed using PayPal - with the same account that powers the shop sales - so all the eggs are in the same basket and easy to reconcile.

All sales are processed in Qi and executed using Paypal. Considering Qi processed in excess of £30k in tickets sales in the first month alone, we believe it all works really well.

Memberships and friends are another stream of user engagement and funding activity, also managed via Qi.