Responses by Robin Noguier, designer, and Raphaël Noguier, developer

Background: The site promotes the stunning work of Russian photographer Elena Iv-Skaya. Elena has a passion for highly aesthetic, strong and elegant imagery with saturated colors, and we built a minimalist layout that let her work stand out on its own. The site introduces Elena to professional photographers, models and agencies that might hire her for shoots. Since her main audience is on Instagram, we put a lot of work into the site’s mobile version—making it accessible and easy to use was a must.

Design core: The design needed to be as elegant and clean as possible. We chose a serif font that felt like one you’d see in a fashion newspaper, and plenty of negative space ensures the pictures do not fight with each other for attention. The site’s core feature is the hold and drag on the home page, enabling you to see all of Elena’s series in an overview. Because there are 31 series—and that we expect many more in the coming months—we built a way to navigate quickly throughout all her works.

Challenges: We wanted a super straightforward structure where you can’t get lost: a homepage that houses all Elena’s series’ covers, an about page where you’ll find all information about Elena and a series page that shows every picture of a project—not more, not less. The main problem with photographers’ websites is that you need to open a series, look at it and then go back to the home gallery to choose another series. To keep the user in the browsing flow, we added a gallery slider on the bottom of each series, so you get an opportunity to go directly to another one without having to backtrack to a landing page.

Navigation features: We came up with a simple opening animation that works throughout the whole website: showing a full-screen preview of what you will see on the next page. We believe that it makes you dive into that series deeply and right from the beginning. We also chose to keep the scroll position when you go back to the homepage gallery. This was meant to increase the number of series users will open.

Technology: For the front end, we used Nuxt.js and Tweenmax for some animations. We worked with Prismic for the back end to create the series pages.