Through the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 myself and the other co-founders of May Fair worked tirelessly to deliver an online art fair in August 2020 after our plans to host a traditional in person art fair were no longer possible due to lockdowns.

We were tasked with how to deliver an engaging art fair online in the absence of the traditional in-person experience. How to contextualise artists and their works without the face-to-face dialog that happens at art fairs as well as the embodied experience of seeing works in person.

May Fair was established by myself, Ophelia King, Eleanor Woodhouse, and Becky Hemus and delivered by render artist Edward Smith, web developer Samuel Beca, and identity designer Raphael Roake.

View full website and experience at mayfairartfair.com

Our goal was to design and build a platform that sought to resolve replacing an in-person experience with a meaningful and exciting online journey. We saw other galleries and art fairs responding to the pandemic by quickly shifting things online in a very traditional e-commerce format. We felt that digital experiences and spaces have fewer boundaries than the physical so why not have fun with that and have artists and galleries design an imaginary and at times physically impossible booth to show their artworks in.

It was also important to create an experience where visitors felt welcome and had the same kind of exploratory sense of discovery that you would get in person. This extended to the digital booth renders, artist moodboards and accompanying exhibition texts that were commissioned to give context and meaning to each booth.

May Fair is the only art fair in New Zealand that celebrates new-generation artists who are not yet represented by a commercial gallery. Because New Zealand is so small there are only a handful of professional contemporary art galleries, but we have so many artists who are consistently producing high-calibre work and exhibitions. May Fair provides a platform for these artists to sell their artworks and reach out to new audiences.

Our users were the general public interested in the arts as well as artists and art professionals.

We aimed to design an experience that was open to all demographics but we really did want to encourage patrons [users] of a younger age who wouldn't normally be able to access artworks from fairs that price you out from the offset. The look and feel of the visual identity and journey were designed with this user in mind.

We also sort to create a very transparent experience that didn't isolate users of different technological literacies. The design was tested on a variety of users and devices to ensure it was as seamless as possible and re-iterated each time. Decisions like having the menu ever-present and options to get back to the index page [building] were important.

Due to time constraints, we were not able to complete thorough usability testing and user research but we did our best with the resources we had.

When tackling the user experience design we opted to use a combination of a standard website format with still and video 3-D renderings designed with the gallery or artist.

The website was also designed to reflect a spatial experience relating to the idea of booths within a larger building (the traditional format of art fairs). The index page of the website featured an interactive "building" through which the user could navigate through the fair at their leisure.

Each ‘booth’ page was unique and designed in collaboration with the artist or gallery featured in the space. Here users could view the works in an imagined context and scroll to read texts from art writers about the works / installation, see the works in the detail and have the option to purchase.

The buying experience was designed to be price transparent and there wasn’t a checkout process on-site, users had to enquire to purchase or with any questions they had. We wanted to offer an opportunity for dialog as well as a communication avenue to organise delivery. We didn’t want to devalue the work by having a standard checkout system or isolate the user with feeling they had to commit immeditately.

Should users wish to find out more regarding individual artists and their practice they could navigate to ‘artist pages’ where we sought to further contextualise the artist's background and practice. This was an attempt to replace the face-to-face conversations that are had in the art fair space where patrons can usually talk to galleries, and artists to learn more. The artist pages were also like profile pages, aiming to platform the artists and give them autonomy to express and communicate about themselves and practice in their own way and words.

The response from the wider art community to May Fair was incredible, as we managed to offer a way for people to connect digitally with peers and practitioners even when in-person exhibitions had been delayed or cancelled.

Almost every booth sold multiple artworks, and some booths sold out.

We are incredibly proud that May Fair was able to connect artists with new audiences who might have either never heard of their practice, or who might have admired an artist’s work from afar and not known how to go about purchasing a piece with ease.

Below is a video tour through some of the booths designed by galleries and artists and rendered by Edward Smith.

Full site can be viewed at mayfairartfair.com