Responses by Timothée Roussilhe, development and interaction design

Background: The site’s goal is to present the young, extremely talented British photographer Jack Davison’s work. The site presents a mix of personal projects and client work.

Highlights: The site’s simplicity. Then we have the “dynamic” cursor that will follow mouse movement and display the current collection and title. We wanted to guide users through the exploration of Davison’s work chapter-by-chapter, collection-by-collection. When users click the photo, it will display instantly, but if users reach a new collection, then the transition will be animated, creating some rhythm and narrative.

Challenges: Making the site load fast, and keeping the loading between photos almost invisible. We have 20 sizes for each photo and we serve the optimal size for each user’s browser size and pixel ratio. We also try to preload the photos that users will see next based on the current one and the direction of the navigation.

Favorite details: The photos of Jack Davison are so good that we just want to look at them all day. Based on this idea, with site designer Vincent Tavano, we decided that the website needed a screensaver mode. If users leave the site open for 25 seconds, the screensaver mode kicks in and randomly displays Davison’s photos.

Navigational structure: The work is front and center and the rest of the navigational system is built around it. Users click the left or right half of the screen to change the photo, and then have two options to complement the simple navigation: exploring categories by checking the index or navigating between all the photos of the current collection by clicking the thumbnails.

Anything new: One key element for Jack was being able to manage his content easily. But we also wanted to keep the site fully customizable, so we used Prismic, an API-based headless CMS that allows users to configure and edit all content on the platform, and then display it. In the end, we created a custom CMS that was pretty easy for our client to use.