We collaborated with the Royal Academy of Arts as it’s exclusive digital partner for its annual Summer Exhibition. Allowing millions around the world to experience the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition online viewing the 1,172 artworks in a new digitised format. Our wallpaper displays all of the artworks through an innovative “Lucky Dip” format, which implements a dynamic grid to reflect the actual walls of the Royal Academy and the diversity of the Summer Exhibition. With every click, new artwork is revealed and the wallpaper automatically adjusts its dimensions to match the piece, bringing the vibrancy of the exhibition to life.

• Situation: In 2020, The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, which had even continued throughout two World Wars, would be held for the 252nd time. This year was the first time the exhibition was forced to partially close its doors due to the pandemic.

• Brief: Find a way to reach new audiences for the Summer Exhibition, so people would still be able to experience the brilliant artworks.

• Objectives: To align with the values of the Summer Exhibition – specifically to make art accessible to a large audience. Through its unique submission and curation process, the exhibition historically shows emerging and established artists alongside one another, The goal was to show the works in a new way, displaying them in the same democratic sense, so the public could still experience the exhibition worldwide, even when the physical doors of the RA were closed during lockdown.

Our internal creative studio designed a full screen interactive digital experience on our digital platform using a responsive grid that mimicked the walls of a curated gallery space, while fully integrating RA’s Summer Exhibition identity. The experience was designed in such a way that with every click a new piece of art would appear, encouraging the user to explore more. Our editorial platform created an accompanying article with audio snippets and quotes from the exhibition curators, acting as a guided tour to the online exhibition.

The target audience was our user base and our readership, they are all people working within the creative industry.

We have 70 million monthly users in 190 countries. Our editorial arm has 4m monthly readers in 190 countries.

• Approach

Our approach was to produce a digital interactive experience where users could browse through the 1,172 artworks from the exhibition via our Wallpapers, showcased 23 Million times to its worldwide audience. It clicked through to an article on our online editorial magazine where readers could get an insight into the curation process of the RA’s jury. It was designed as a guided audio tour where the jurors spoke about their ways of working and highlighted specific pieces in the exhibition.

Our creative studio designed this digital experience, using a responsive grid mimicking the walls of a curated gallery space, while fully integrating RA’s Summer Exhibition identity. It was designed in such a way that with every click a new piece of art would appear, making the user want to explore more.

To showcase the artworks, we developed a pipeline, built in Node JS, which collected 2 gigabytes of data, the artwork, dimensions, file size, artist and medium. It was processed and stored in separate AWS S3 buckets. Making sure we showcased each artwork randomly, we opted to use Simplex Noise instead of the default math random.

Design phase: 7th-18th Sept

Development: 21st-25th Sept

Feedback on preview link due from RA: 25th Sept

Dev feedback/v2: 28th-30th Sept

Final preview link: Friday 2 Oct

Launch: Tues Oct 6

• Placement

Our wallpapers and editorial article

• Scale

Showcased 23 Million times

In the first four weeks of the campaign, 22,794,238 users saw our campaign x Royal Academy wallpaper on the website.

119,359 entered the experience (and thus visited the online exhibition) and saw at least one artwork from the exhibition.

32% of all people who entered the experience clicked to see 2 artworks or more (38,477).

Those who clicked through after seeing 2 artworks, tended to stick around: 15% saw at least 5 artworks or more (18,255 people)

10,938 people saw 9 artworks or more.

4,472 people stayed and clicked to see more than 20 artworks.

2,708 people saw more than 50 artworks.

And there were 1,736 people who stuck around for more than 100 artworks.

To place in context: the physical exhibition was visited about 30,000 times in the first month before it had to close due to covid-19 regulations.

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