Tilted Brick Gallery

Tilted Brick Gallery is an artist-run centre kept going by the women who founded it and a volunteer board. Every hour spent wrestling with a website is an hour not spent on exhibitions, artists or the space itself.

What they needed was not an impressive site. It was one that would still be current in six months without anyone technical being available to keep it that way.

A custom site with an admin built for people who do not work in software. Artists, exhibits, events and the board are each editable on their own terms, and a change is live the moment it is saved.

Two decisions came from watching how the gallery actually works. Nothing is ever really deleted — removing something moves it to a restorable trash, so a mistake made in a hurry is recoverable rather than final. And every confirmation is a real in-page dialog rather than a browser pop-up, because the site is managed from an iPad and iPadOS suppresses the browser kind silently.

We also moved the society onto Google Workspace for Nonprofits, so the gallery's email and files sit on the same footing as its website.

The board updates the site themselves, on the device they already carry around the gallery. Nothing routes through us to go live.

The processes that used to consume volunteer time — posting an exhibition, adding an artist, correcting a date — are now short enough that they stop being jobs anyone has to schedule.