Royal Drawing School
Draw and Explore
Reimagining the Royal Drawing School's website around a simple idea: navigation that feels like the School itself, with artwork and accessibility at the heart of the design.
Wireframe user journeys for user testing
Challenge
Approaching its 25th anniversary, the Royal Drawing School had outgrown a website last designed in 2014. The experience was fragmented, courses were hard to find and compare, and the rigid setup left the internal team unable to curate content for campaigns. Worst of all, the site failed to convey the energy of the School's physical studios. The brief was to build a digital presence that served a demanding, diverse audience, from professional artists to young students to donors, and to knit it together with foundational workstreams already in motion, including a new CRM. It needed to be, in the School's words, the "undercoat for the next 25 years and beyond."
Early ideation for the look at feel of the site. Replicating the way the art is shown on the walls at the school.
Solution
I grounded the work in data before any design began, combining behavioural insight from the School's analysts with our own analytics and one-on-one interviews. That research surfaced the real problems, high mobile drop-off and an over-reliance on homepage navigation, and kept every decision focused on genuine user needs rather than assumptions.
Working alongside Pentagram's new brand identity, I led a "Draw and Explore" design direction that made navigation intuitive while carrying the School's character online. Artwork was never cropped, preserving its original proportions, and I built a flexible component system that lets editors colour-match calls to action to the artwork with contrast checks built in. This meant a minimal black-and-white system could still let the imagery sing, and accessibility became a catalyst for the creative work rather than a limit on it. Throughout, I mapped and streamlined the key journeys, making booking a course or donating noticeably clearer.
Impact
The result is a platform that inspires as well as informs. Accessibility was treated as a creative opportunity, not a constraint, and the site achieved an average 97/100 on Google Lighthouse.
The flexible tools now let the team tell vivid stories that reflect the life of the physical school, while a richer, data-led picture of users continues to shape it. The project set a blueprint for the School's next phase of growth and its mission to broaden access to arts education.
