Dancer at a Sampad Arts event

Going Beyond Dance, Music, Art and Literature with Sampad.org.uk

The all new Sampad Arts website has launched! Sampad’s mission is to connect people with South Asian and British Asian Arts and Heritage, and to play a cutting-edge role in the creative economy.

Here at SMILE, we worked with the team at Sampad to breathe life into their online presence. It was an interesting project for us to work on as it falls out of our usual remit of education and institutions. Being a charity, Sampad’s focus was more on providing for the community and a creating a way for the community to give back.

Sampad believes in the power of arts and heritage to impact widely on all communities towards bringing people together from all walks of life.

Operating for more than 30 years, Sampad promotes and encourages South Asian and British Asian arts and heritage so that they progress, break new ground and enrich mainstream culture in the UK. They support, commission and co-produce a huge variety of arts and heritage activities inspired by diverse artforms that originate from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

When designing the new Sampad website, we took into consideration their vibrant brand and striking imagery and wanted to give that a proper place to flourish on the web. We weren’t tied to the usual strict restrictions that we face when designing for the education sector, so it was an enjoyable project to run free on.

Employing component-led designs, we were able to afford Sampad the flexibility to create much more variety in their page layouts. With all blocks brand-controlled, there was never a risk that content choices would fall outside of Sampad’s distinctive brand.

As an arts organisation, Sampad naturally has a rich bank of media which reflects the variety of activities they support. We built a site that allows this media to be showcased in the best possible light. The homepage has a background video hero section, one with the potential to completely cover the entire page. This was a brave choice by the Sampad team, one which we wholeheartedly support.

Mobile mockups of the Sampad Arts website

Templates for News and Events also provide large areas for images, and new staff profile pages allow faces to be put to names for those looking for more information on the Sampad team.

Probably the most important piece of functionality we added for the Sampad site was the Donate block. As a charity, Sampad relies on the support is receives in order to continue providing for the community. Wrapping Donate functionality into a Gutenberg block, we ensured that Sampad can place a Donate block on whichever pages they choose. Site visitors can also choose a custom amount, as well as suggested amounts, which is a nice touch unlocking the potential for sizeable donations.

Jon
Jon