Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

PicassoZ Art Cafe is a paint your own pottery studio in Florida that endeavors to make art a fun and social activity.  We’ve been impressed with how they engage with their customers and try to break their natural inhibitions about not being an artist.  Their studio is painted and decorated in lively colors, and their old website tried to bring that same feeling to the web through bright colors and shapes.  The site was outdated, though, and no longer met their needs.  It was time for an update.

PicassoZ is part of the StudioDish network, so it’s built with WordPress Mu.  The theme we designed for PicassoZ was made with their unique customer-base and focus in mind, but also open-ended enough that other StudioDish users could use the same theme for their store site on the StudioDish blogging community.  The theme is built on the WordPress Market Theme framework, which is an impressive approach to adapting WordPress to an e-commerce site.  I’ve worked with other WordPress e-commerce solutions in the past, and this beats them in terms of functionality, ease-of-use, and flexibility.

We wanted the site to have the feeling of a pottery studio, so we used colors that could be found in fired and wet clay, glazes, and paints, and used paint splatters to give the design a fun and messy feeling — just like making pottery itself.  Since the theme would also be used for other sites, we wanted to do something that would make the PicassoZ site stand out from other sites using the same theme, so we customized their logo — using a warm terracotta color for the logo to match the color palette of the theme, and adding a sun mosaic next to the logo that was a signature feature of the old site and their studio.  The new PicassoZ site is a rich, web 2.0-enabled experience with interactive features, online booking for events, news feed, and a shop.

WordPress plugins used: Appointy, cforms, Flash Short Tags

www.picassoscup.com