Developing a shared creative experience through practical changes in today’s studio and a staged vision for what comes next.
Explore The Artist CoopRecovering Clay · Independent contribution
Connect the studio,
inside and out.
Bringing a ceramics studio’s story, digital experience and everyday service pathways together as it grew into a new space.
What does a growing studio
need people to understand?
Early discovery surfaced manual registration tracking, membership and payment needs, and a firing process that crossed measurement, documentation and invoicing. There were also ideas for community features. The practical challenge was deciding what needed to work first, while helping people understand the studio and find their way into it.
I prioritized the operating foundation alongside the public experience. The work began with discovery and a first website, then continued through the move downtown. It connected brand direction, information architecture, content and implementation, including introducing KilnFire to help establish the studio’s operations.
Bring the story
and the service together.
I worked from the studio’s identity, audience and offering into brand direction and information architecture, then designed and built the site page by page. The work included a Squarespace-to-Webflow migration and a later relaunch for the downtown space. The goal was a coherent entry point into the studio, with information people could use rather than disconnected announcements.
I introduced KilnFire as the third-party service supporting studio operations, then linked the public website to the appropriate services for classes, membership, accounts and firing. This joined the public-facing experience with the practical work behind participation. The contribution was choosing and introducing the existing product and designing those pathways, not building KilnFire itself.
I ran one-to-one discovery workshops with participating artists to understand their practice, stories and content needs. That work informed an editorial approach and reusable artist-profile CMS. The structure gave individual artists room to be distinct while making profiles easier to maintain as part of one website.
Two tools, with different responsibilities.
PUBLIC EXPERIENCE
Webflow
Explain the studio, services and artists. Help people choose a way in.
SERVICE PATHWAY
A deliberate handoff
Connect the appropriate class, membership, account or firing action.
STUDIO OPERATIONS
KilnFire
Use an existing specialist product to support the operational workflow.
Make it useful now, and workable to maintain.
Keep the people visible
inside the structure.
I had joined Recovering Clay as a student and stayed involved as the community grew. That perspective mattered: a shared content model could make the site easier to manage, but it also needed to preserve the people it represented. I used artist conversations before defining the profiles, so the structure grew from the stories and work it needed to hold.
The same principle connected the wider project. The website explained the experience; KilnFire supported participation; the CMS helped the studio keep its artists and content present. Each part had a different job within the same service.
A live site.
A structure to keep using.
The completed contribution included the initial website, the Webflow migration and downtown relaunch, pathways into KilnFire, launched artist-profile content and a reusable profile CMS informed by discovery workshops. The structure was designed so the studio could add profiles without creating a new page design each time.
Further profile content and ideas for community discussion, studio presence indicators and learning pathways remained opportunities for the studio to consider. They were separate from the completed contribution. Any future work would need a new agreement about priorities, ownership and scope.
The website is
part of the studio.
This work brought research, design and implementation into the same practical setting. The value was in connecting how the studio presented itself with how people joined in, and giving the organization tools and content structures it could continue to use.
