DeLong Photography
Single Page Portfolio Website
Project Overview
The website is an online portfolio for Dorothy DeLong, a feminist photographer capturing extraordinary women doing extraordinary things across the country. She wants a simple one-page site that is low maintenance yet makes an impact on her audience. The page includes a gallery of her work, bio, the ability to contact her with professional opportunities, and a link to her CV.
Scope of project
The photographer requested that I build her a simple one-page website to showcase her photography work in a compelling design.
Dorothy had a specific objective she wanted to achieve with her website and needed my professional expertise as a web designer to attract both magazine spreads and museum exhibits.
My Role
Dorothy wants her site to showcase her work in a way that will interest magazines in hiring her for feature spreads and also catch the eye of curators from museums locally and abroad. Having an online presence with her site will enable her to level up her career by making it possible to view her work easily anywhere in the world, which isn't possible with the physical portfolio she has been using.
Problem & Goal
Design Process
The first step in my design process was to sit with Dorothy and get to know her, her personality, and the website's primary objective. We talked about the message of her work and how best to present it to two different audiences with differing vehicles for her art. She already had a logo she was happy with, and a wide selection of images for me to work with, making it easier for me to get a sense of direction for the site.
The next step was compiling the images we would use on the site. I combed through many photographs, narrowing it down to those that made the most substantial impact and showed the most comprehensive range of skills to connect with the magazine culture and the museum experience.
Images
After reflecting on Dorothy's images, I decided on the color palette I wanted to use for the website. I wanted the site to have an energy of strength within femininity. I chose to pair a soft, muted pink with black to balance the energy of power and vulnerability emanating from the images.
Color
With the tone set in imagery and color, it was time to move on to typography. Striving to achieve that same balance of yin and yang within the type, I chose the sans-serif font, Urbanist for the titles of sections and the navigation bar and paired it with a softer, more organic serif font of Lora for paragraphs of text and quotes. Dorothy's last name and job title are in the font of Cormorant Unicase to compliment the style of her logo.
Typography
Type-scale for : DeLong Photography
60pt
36pt
28pt
18pt
The last step was to create low-fidelity wireframes of the design to ensure a proper hierarchy of information and ease of usability. Once satisfied with the placement of elements, I created the high-fidelity mock-up to visualize better precisely how the site would look and make any necessary alterations.
Wireframes
Final Design
Challenges & Takeaways
My initial design comp for Dorothy's site started with a more vibrant and raucous energy that screamed #Me Too. I chose a vibrant fuchsia pink that was bold and in your face. The imagery was set in a standard grid but felt too contained and cliché, dampening the story we were trying to tell with her work. I felt like the design would limit the audience to specific magazines and potentially deter other avenues for her art. I decided to iterate on the design, keeping the elements that worked, and adjusted the image gallery's viewing experience. I also felt the bold pink detracted attention from the site's primary goal. So I muted the hue of the pink to be gentler on the eyes and make the focus of the site Dorothy's art.
Having made the adjustments, Dorothy and I agreed that the overarching theme and style of the site worked not only to tell her story but to attract diverging groups of people to her work, be it from the perspective of journalism or fine art.
Designing this site was a valuable learning experience relating to maintaining a constructively critical eye on the design and being able to adjust and adapt when necessary. It's imperative to keep the ultimate goal in mind and not be married to any particular design choices. If it doesn't achieve the purpose, iterate until it does.