Case study
The Art of Bruce Thomson
A permanent home for a Scottish artist's work.
Artist's archive · Ongoing · Site design, gallery handling, SEO · Squarespace · custom CSS · structured metadata
Live site: brucethomson.art
A personal project
This is a personal project. My father, Bruce Thomson, was a gifted Scottish artist who passed away and left behind more work than most people ever saw. I wanted to build a place where all of it could live, properly presented, and findable by anyone searching for his name.
Why Squarespace, again
The site is built on Squarespace, chosen for the gallery handling. Art websites live or die on how the images are displayed, and the layouts needed to give each piece room without making the visitor work to find what they're looking for. The navigation is simple because the art should be the thing you notice, not the website around it.
Search engines can't see paintings. The SEO is the part of the work that lets the art find the right people.
Words for an image-led site
What often gets missed on art portfolio sites is the written content. Galleries are visual by nature, and it's tempting to let the images do all the work. But search engines can't see paintings. The SEO was built in from the start: hand-written descriptions, carefully chosen keywords for anyone searching for Scottish art or my father's name, and structured metadata so the work surfaces where it should.
Gallery and sculpture pages
An ongoing relationship
This is an ongoing project. We've only catalogued a fraction of what he left behind. Each time I add a new piece, I'm seeing work I hadn't seen before, or rediscovering something I'd forgotten. Building the site has been a way of spending time with the art, and by extension with him.
What I'd take from this
Some sites aren't products. They're artefacts. They're places that make a body of work findable, citable, and durable — long after the original creator can advocate for it themselves. That's a different kind of brief, and it deserves the same craft as commercial work.