Alastair Smith
Ceramics

Alastair Smith is a ceramicist working from Deemouth Artist Studios in Aberdeen, producing handcrafted, wood and gas fired functional wares — mugs, bowls, plates — made for everyday use. The work is serious. The existing digital presence wasn't.

The brief was to build a site that matched the quality of the ceramics: warm without being rustic, professional without being cold. It needed to do two things simultaneously — tell the story of the maker, and convert visitors into buyers via a linked Shopify store. Most ceramics sites manage one of those. This one had to hold both.

Alongside the site: a full brand identity including logo and business cards. Everything from first mark to final deployment delivered by SCM Design Studio.

Five pages, fully coded. Home, About, Process, Gallery, Contact. The navigation structure was designed to serve two distinct journeys: someone who arrived ready to buy, and someone who arrived curious about the maker and needed to be convinced.

The Process page does the heaviest strategic work — it's the section that turns a browser into a buyer by making the labour visible. Wood-firing and Raku are slow, skilled, physically demanding processes. Showing that process isn't just storytelling — it's price justification. A handmade piece that's been through a 12-hour wood firing isn't priced the same as factory ceramics, and the site makes sure the visitor understands why before they reach the shop.

The Gallery is filterable by type. The photography — all shot by Alastair — was excellent raw material. The grid layout was designed to let the pieces breathe without becoming a catalogue.

The Shopify store was designed to sit as a linked destination from the site rather than being embedded. The integration was complete on the development side — an unresolved payment dispute with the client meant the store was never activated. The site is live on Netlify and demonstrates the full scope of the build.