The brief
The artist showed her work on Instagram. She needed a place of her own for it, professional and minimal.
Journey mapping told us why the site exists. An art director comes looking for credentials. A visitor comes for more images, and more about each piece.
Content first
We spent the first two to three weeks on research and content, before a single wireframe, because designs stall without real content. The team questioned that rule. It paid off.
Content first, then wireframes.
What we decided
Mobile first
We designed the single column first: fewer factors, fewer mistakes. Tablet and desktop grew out of it, one module at a time.
The work on black
Minimal, as the brief asked: each piece stands on black, with only its title and number.
Pieces and shows as data
The pieces and the exhibitions are stored as JSON, and Eleventy builds the pages from that data.
Testing came in waves and ended with an expert round: four reviewers, each with an itemised critique. We refined the design after every round.
What the expert round flagged
- —An unclear purpose.
- —A template feel.
- —Where the contact form sat.
- —The portfolio carousel.
- —The height of the header on phones.
Under the hood
- 4.1Hand-coded: thousands of lines of mobile-first HTML and CSS, with no page builder and no framework.
- 4.2Plumbing for English and Dutch.
- 4.3A PHP contact form with several layers of spam defence.
- 4.4Fingerprinted file names, so a browser never shows a stale version.
- 4.5SEO metadata on every page.
- 4.6Responsive images in WebP, checked with PageSpeed.
How we worked
A team of seven. I ran the Notion board, planning backwards from the end goal, with small groups by expertise, freedom inside them and regular check-ins.
What I learned
- 6.1A short, team-based project means sacrifices: no logo, and less research of my own.
- 6.2I relearned CSS layout from the ground up, tried JavaScript and set up SEO.
- 6.3It came out more responsive and accessible than anything I had built before.
