Tia Collection

The Tia Collection, based in Santa Fe, holds a global collection of over 5,000 artworks spanning diverse mediums, periods, and geographies. Over 24 months, we collaborated closely with their team to develop a new brand identity and integrate their existing Argus CMS into an intuitive, immersive digital experience, redesigning and relaunching their public facing collection catalogue.

Defining their brand identity involved creating a custom typeface, “Tia Sans™,” along with a comprehensive brand manual to guide communication and implementation. Our Art Director traveled to Santa Fe to lead a three day workshop with the Tia team, developing digital architecture, wireframes, and art direction through iterative processes to shape how users engage with the collection online.

The Tia Collection platform was developed through a custom integration between their existing Argus CMS and the Qi content management system, creating a seamless connection between internal data management and the public-facing website. Rather than migrating away from their established setup, we built a solution that allows Qi to draw directly from the Argus API, enabling the client to continue managing and updating records in Argus as usual while those updates are automatically reflected online.

This approach ensured continuity of their existing workflows while extending the reach of their data into a more accessible and engaging digital experience for audiences.

To highlight the breadth and global reach of the Tia Collection, we introduced an interactive exhibition map that visualises where works have been shown around the world. Each exhibition is represented by a pin, which reveals key details on hover and allows users to navigate directly to the associated exhibition.

This feature is available across dedicated tabs for current and upcoming exhibitions, offering a clear view of both active loans and future openings. Given the scale at which the Tia Collection lends works internationally, the map provides a powerful, immediate sense of its worldwide presence and impact.

As part of the Tia Collection online platform, we enhanced the search experience to make the collection more discoverable and intuitive to navigate. Users can search and filter works by defined categories including artists, dates, nationalities, cultures, and media, enabling more precise and meaningful exploration of the archive.

We also implemented a flexible content visibility system, giving the Tia team full control over how objects and features are presented to different audiences. Works and functionality can be conditionally shown or hidden depending on whether a user is browsing publicly or logged in. Registered users benefit from extended access, including deeper visibility across the collection, the ability to enquire directly about artworks, and tools to save curated albums of objects within their account. They can also make batch enquiries, streamlining communication around multiple works at once.

The Tia Collection platform represents a significant advancement in their digital presence, enhancing how their extensive global collection is accessed, explored, and engaged with online. It brings together detailed curatorial information with a clear, accessible user experience, while supporting advanced search functionality, an interactive global exhibition map, account based features, and configurable content visibility for different audiences.

Developed through a bespoke integration between Argus CMS and Qi, the system offers long term adaptability for managing collection data, relationships, and workflows, providing a scalable foundation for continued growth and deeper engagement.