Backlit
A Victorian factory, home to over 120 artists.
Backlit is an artist-led gallery and studios in Nottingham, spread over three floors of a Victorian textile factory. It’s a registered charity, and the income from studio memberships and space hire is what keeps its public programme running.
From Figma to launch
I built the Backlit website in 2022, during my time at Kind, working from designs the studio team produced. Everything after handover was mine: the front-end build, the content model, hosting, and deployment.
It replaced a Squarespace site that had started to get in the way. Backlit couldn’t present their exhibitions and artists the way they wanted to, because the template system wouldn’t bend that far.
The rebuild used Craft CMS, Tailwind and Vite. A deliberately ordinary stack, chosen because it’s boring in the ways that matter: quick to build with, cheap to host, and easy for whoever comes next to pick up.
Built so a small team can run it
Backlit is a charity with a small team and no developer on call, and that shaped every decision about the CMS.
Modelled on the programme
Exhibitions, events, artists, studios and spaces each have their own fields and their own rules, rather than a pile of generic pages.
Event types that carry through
A family activity, a screening night and an exhibition can look different in a listing without anyone touching a template.
Components, not page templates
The team assemble something new when the programme calls for it, instead of waiting on a quote.
An archive worth keeping
A gallery’s back catalogue is part of its case for funding. The site carries a full archive of past exhibitions, filterable by year, so work from 2013 is as easy to reach as this season’s programme.
Spaces that pay for the programme
Studio memberships, venue hire and donations fund the free public programme, so they couldn’t be buried three clicks down. Hire enquiries, tour bookings and membership sign-ups each have their own route through the site, and the reason they matter is stated plainly: income from hiring out space goes back into artist development.
The building, in the brand
The identity, designed by the team at Kind, took its cues from the gallery’s big arched factory windows. Translating that into components was the interesting part of the front-end work. They had to hold their shape at every size, and still look right when an exhibition has no image yet, or a title runs to three lines.
