Lino Tagliapietra

An artistic showcase in Drupal and Shopify

World-renowned Italian glassblower, Lino Tagliapietra needed a website that reflected his artistic abilities and connected fans with his work.

SERVICES PROVIDED

Drupal Development
Shopify Development

DESIGN PARTNER: DESIGN HOVIE STUDIOS

Explore More

Meet Lino Tagliapietra

Meet Lino Tagliapietra

Curating stunning simplicity with Shopify and Drupal capabilities.

Lino Tagliapietra, born in 1934 in Murano, Italy, became an apprentice glassblower at age 11 before earning the title of “Maestro” when he was just 21. His unique pieces are present in some of the most prestigious museums throughout the world, as well as numerous galleries and private collections. Lino Tagliapietra has been visiting the Pacific Northwest since 1979 and splits his time between Murano and Seattle, Washington.

The Challenge

The Lino Taliapietra website was actually quite beautiful when we first met. However, the UX shifted from page-to-page, and there were some difficult-to-maintain aspects like full-screen 360-degree walkthroughs. Their team wanted us to help simplify the experience, featuring the art more prominently, and create a platform that is incredibly easy to navigate and update.

Two factors were important in the new website — design and development. For the design aspect, we went with Hovie Hawk Design, one of our longtime design partners. Hovie Hawk Design was the perfect design partner for this project. He lived for many years in Milan, Italy, working in design studios there, and is very familiar with the aesthetic and approach that would resonate with Lino Tagliapietra’s audience: Italian beauty through simplicity. This style requires an unrelenting focus on good design.

The Solution

The new site is in Drupal 9, the latest version of the Drupal CMS platform. We used the latest iteration of our base theme as the jumping-off point. This base theme uses Bootstrap.js as an underlying technology and has a library of components that speeds development and makes it more consistent.

We leveraged many front-end techniques that make this website unique:

A dynamic footer that randomizes featured artwork on page load.
The “Eyebrow”: Similar to breadcrumbs, but linkable text that becomes part of the navigation and sits above the H1 on a page.
Using the media module, to handle sizing and caching of big, beautiful images of all different sizes so they display consistently.
A fun javascript “zoom” feature if you hover over a large image to see some of the glass detail.
A large, full-width navigation that drops down for easy one-click jumps to other areas of the site.
A scrolling timeline, built as paragraph types in Drupal.
Subtle body background images, with tan or white overlays.

a screenshot showing various sizes of the Lino website

The Results

In addition to the main site, there is a Shopify store selling books, DVDs, and other materials about Lino and his work.

We quickly rebuilt the existing Shopify side with a minimalist theme (not replicating the full navigation). This was a great use of Shopify for simplified store capabilities while keeping their website’s branding and design consistent on a subdomain. The newly-redesigned Lino Tagliapietra website launched in early summer of 2021, preceding a documentary release in honor of Maestro Tagliapietra.