Oxcombe Pottery · Brand & Web
Oxcombe Pottery is a creative hub in the Lincolnshire Wolds offering pottery, fine art, workshops, exhibitions, and conference facilities across four studios. The brief called for a high-specification website and full brand overhaul that balanced modern design with a warm, rustic character.
Oxcombe Pottery had grown significantly beyond its origins as a single pottery studio. With four studios now spanning pottery, fine art, workshops, exhibitions, and conference facilities, the business needed a digital presence that could reflect its full scope and support the next stage of its commercial growth.
Commissioned in 2021, the brief was for a high-specification website, not a simple brochure site, but a fully featured platform with booking capabilities, membership functionality, e-commerce, and event management, all wrapped in a brand identity that felt both modern and true to the studio's craft-led character.
The central design challenge was architectural. Building a multi-tiered booking system that allowed customers to discover, reserve, modify, and cancel class bookings through a personalised profile area. A separate members' portal needed to be integrated, surfacing exclusive perks, such as priority booking, exhibition access and shop discounts in a way that felt like a benefit rather than a paywall.
Alongside this, the brand needed a full overhaul. The existing identity no longer reflected the quality and breadth of what Oxcombe offered, and a refreshed visual language was essential to supporting the more ambitious commercial goals the site was designed to enable.
The brand direction was developed first, establishing the visual language that would inform all subsequent design decisions. A rustic, earthy colour palette was developed to evoke the studio's physical environment. The textures of clay, the warmth of a working kiln, the quiet of the Lincolnshire Wolds. This was balanced with clean typography and structured layout to ensure the site read as professional and easy to navigate rather than simply decorative.
The booking system presented the most complex UX challenge. The information architecture had to accommodate multiple class types across different studios, varying capacity and pricing structures, and different user states (new visitor, returning booker and member), all without creating a confusing experience for any of them. Extensive user flow mapping preceded any wireframing, ensuring the logic was sound before visual decisions were made.
The members' portal was designed as a natural extension of the user profile rather than a separate system, with membership status revealing additional content and functionality contextually rather than through a separate login or section.
A fully featured website with integrated booking, membership, and e-commerce functionality, supporting the commercial growth ambitions outlined in the original brief.
A refreshed brand identity that reflected the quality and breadth of what Oxcombe offered, applied consistently across the website and all digital touchpoints.
A clean handoff to the Oxcombe team, who subsequently brought on a dedicated web developer to continue the site's growth. A sign the foundations were solid and well-documented enough to build on.
Working on both simultaneously, rather than completing the brand before starting the UX, meant design decisions in each area consistently informed the other. A colour developed for brand warmth became the key to signalling membership status in the UI. That kind of coherence is harder to achieve when the two workstreams are kept separate.
The booking system had a lot of moving parts, but users shouldn't have to feel that. Every step in the flow was designed to present users with only the decisions they needed to make at that moment, hiding the structural complexity behind a calm, guided experience.
Knowing the site would be handed to a developer and then maintained by the Oxcombe team shaped how documentation was approached and how the system was structured. A design that only makes sense to the person who created it isn't finished.
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