BeaubzArt - E-commerce Art Website

BeaubzArt - Website Design & Brand Identity Squarespace · Ecommerce · Brand Identity · Product Design

BeaubzArt is the new online home of Alicia Beaubrun-Nilsson, a Swedish-Caribbean acrylic and mixed-media artist. Alicia came to me with vibrant, expressive work; she just needed a site that could sell original paintings, prints, and merchandise, showcase her exhibition history, and most importantly feel as distinctive as the paintings themselves.

The core challenge was avoiding the trap most artist websites fall into: clean and minimal to the point of feeling cold, or generic to the point of feeling forgettable. Alicia's work is bold, warm, and full of personality. The site needed to match that.

Alicia needed a full e-commerce website she could manage independently after handover, with no technical background. The scope included a general shop for prints and merchandise, a separate elevated collector section for original paintings, an exhibitions page, Printful print-on-demand integration, and a brand identity built from scratch.

The project began with a research and discovery phase, followed by the development of three distinct design directions:

Direction 1 Gallery Explosion: Clean, white space-heavy, gallery aesthetic. Let the paintings do the talking. Inspired by high-end gallery sites with a twist of personality in the colour palette.

Direction 2 Bold Shapes: The site reflects the energy of the paintings directly. Vibrant, warm, and almost playful, organic shapes, a sandy textured background, and bold typography.

Direction 3 Editorial: Somewhere between a designed art magazine and a personal studio journal. Warm, textured, storytelling-led.

Alicia chose Direction 2. It was the clear standout, the most distinctive, the most on-brand, and the most capable of differentiating BeaubzArt from the sea of minimal white-background artist sites.

The brand concept was built around a single word: joy. An experience that feels premium but never serious, and deliberately avoids the Scandinavian minimalism that dominates the Swedish design landscape.

The visual identity was developed in parallel with the website, creating a cohesive system that works across the site, product design, and printed materials.

The signature element of the Direction 2 identity is a set of organic shapes, an arch, and a blob used as navigation devices on the homepage, each representing a different section of the site (Collectors, Prints, Merch). These shapes give the site an immediately recognisable visual language.

A sandy texture (made from her work) runs through key sections of the site, giving it a tactile, handmade quality that connects to the physical nature of the paintings. The colour palette was pulled directly from Alicia's work, warm cream, deep teal, sunlight yellow, flame coral, and a rich espresso reserved for the elevated Collectors section.

Typography pairs Familijen Grotesk (bold, contemporary display font) with Satoshi (friendly, rounded body font) and Gambarino as an italic accent, creating a system that feels modern and confident without losing warmth.

The site was built on Squarespace with a dual shop structure to serve two distinct buyer audiences:

The main shop handles prints and merchandise, accessible, browsable, and visually energetic. Printful integration allows automatic fulfilment of print-on-demand products without Alicia needing to manage stock or shipping.

The Collectors section is treated as a completely separate visual world, a dark, warm, elevated space for original paintings. Each work is displayed as a framed wall mock-up with realistic lighting and shadow, both for aesthetic reasons and to protect against screenshot theft. Sold works remain listed marked as "Sold" to build credibility and show demand.

The Exhibitions page uses Squarespace's built-in Calendar page type, allowing Alicia to add new exhibitions herself in a consistent style without touching the design.

Additional pages include a full About page using Alicia's own writing, a Collections page with colour-sampled section backgrounds pulled from each painting.

Five art tote bags were designed as part of the merch range, each featuring a full all-over print of one of Alicia's paintings.

Additional products designed include a ceramic mug and a stainless steel water bottle, each using a carefully cropped section of a painting to make the most of the product shape.

Full Squarespace website (homepage, shop, collector section, prints page, merch page, exhibitions, collections, about)

Brand identity (logo, colour palette, typography system, graphic elements)

Brand guidelines document

Legal pages (Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Shipping & Returns, T&Cs, Imprint)

Printful product setup and integration

Five art tote bag designs

Mug and water bottle designs

Handover session and ongoing support