Melissa White.
30 significant works. 1 brand. A shop to buy the work direct.
Live site · melissawhite.co.uk
Melissa White has hand painted heritage murals, wallpapers, and decorative interiors for 30 years – working from a studio in Hastings for interior designers, hotels, and private clients across the UK and beyond. Her work is in Buckingham Palace, Johnnie Walker’s Edinburgh flagship, and Fortnum & Mason Hong Kong. She has licensed designs with Zoffany, GP&J Baker, and Andrew Martin. The work existed. The reputation existed. What was missing was a brand that made both findable under her own name – and a shop to sell direct. Whisk Digital built the brand, the identity, the website, and the shop. All of it, for a fixed fee.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I keep discovering new things.
- Client
- Melissa White, decorative artist
- Year
- 2025
- Sector
- Decorative art and murals
- Location
- Hastings, East Sussex
- Work
- Brand · Identity · Website · Shop
A strategy for 16 different user types.
Melissa’s brand and site had to speak to 16 distinct audiences, from Tudor scholars and wealthy homeowners to luxury hotel groups and customers buying a single print. We built the strategic architecture first, before any design began. The result: 5 shop departments, 30 works written and structured for each target audience, and a custom animation of her signature wallpaper on the homepage.
The brand system we made with Melissa.
Greg refined a visual identity Melissa had sketched out, resolving the logo, settling the colour palette, and choosing a type pairing in Source Serif 4 and Source Sans 3 that sits alongside her work without competing with it. The palette was drawn from the tones of her practice: paper, stone, ink, and a single note of claret.
A transitional serif for headers, its sibling grotesque for body. One super-family, harmonious across mural, print, and screen.
An animated hero to make her work come to life.
Melissa’s homepage needed to feel alive without losing the quiet detail that defines her work. We teased apart her mural illustration into 38 individual layers, from figures and foliage to occluders and ambient details, then animated each one in pure CSS. No JavaScript, no video, no compromise on load speed. Characters like the walking monkey and the scanning bird were split further into articulated body parts so they move with weight and intention rather than as flat cut-outs. The result is a homepage hero that breathes and behaves like the painting it came from, deployed through a Netlify CDN with every layer hand-tuned to stay crisp on mobile and quick to first paint.
A beautiful site with a fierce strategy.
We rebuilt Melissa’s site from a loose legacy footprint of 180 pages down to 106 focused ones, every page structured so that search engines and AI assistants can attribute the work correctly. Now when someone searches for her licensed wallpapers through Zoffany, Andrew Martin or GP&J Baker, her name comes with them. The site runs on the platform Melissa already knows, so she has full autonomy to add work, update the shop and manage her own practice independently.
Melissa’s collaborate page speaks separately to interior designers, hotel groups, and licensing partners, each in their own language. The right enquiry arrives already knowing what it is, and Melissa already knows how to answer it.
The shop lets collectors buy originals and prints direct, browsable across five departments. Melissa adds work, sets pricing, and manages every order herself. No agency in the loop, no recurring fee.
How we work. And why this one took longer.
Every Whisk Digital project starts the same way: one strategy day, three years of positioning agreed before lunch, fixed fee signed off before we touch a single asset. Melissa came with thirty significant works, a rich archive, and a career that had simply never had the platform it deserved. We worked with all of it.
If you have a body of work but not a brand, a wealth of material but not a structure, a reputation that deserves a better home, that is exactly where we start. Two senior people, no juniors, no hand offs. Greg designs and builds. Fliss sets the strategy and writes the words. You’ll only work with experts who are set on getting it right.
Yours could be next.
Three weeks from a first call to a live brand. Bring your situation.