Responses by Youval Tayar, cofounder, Yourra.

Background: Commissioned by famous artist Théo Tobiasse’s daughter Catherine, this website aimed to be more than a simple website—it is meant to be a memorial. It also presents Tobiasse’s work to the public, drawing their attention to great museums and galleries. An online catalog with all his work is coming soon, as well as a beautiful e-commerce section.

Design core: The core of the website is a clean aspect mixed with soft animations that tell a story. I like the way that each page is really different from each other while being part of the same story, which makes visitors want to discover them all. I particularly like the diversity of the homepage and the biography page, which is like traveling through time. The work section is also great as visitors can view it as a real catalog.

Favorite details: The grid-style images that you can find throughout the website, and the typography sizes and style variations. We also like the way that the images appear when you hover over work categories on the homepage, as well as the audio player that launches on the first subpage while you read the text. The cursor effects are also nice and intuitive, which augments the navigation in a great way.

Challenges: Faced with putting Théo Tobiasse’s great biography and more than 10,000 works on the site, our biggest challenge was to decide what to show and how to tell his story. The second largest challenge was to find the right balance between those overwhelming colors in his paintings and a clean, user-friendly interface while staying true to his identity.

Time constraints: This project took longer than expected. First, it took quite a long time to gather all the content. We later added more features to enhance the content. Second, I had to change my attitude towards the project and stopped checking how long we would spend on it. Catherine’s will to create a great memorial for her deceased father affected me, and with that emotion, the only thing I had in mind was to create a site that was beautiful, memorable and useful.

Special navigational features: The burger situated at the top right corner permits the user to hide the menu and to give the website more space. Subnavigations use quite special features: for example, on the Theme page where you can enter and exit each subnavigation nicely.

Technology: PHP and JavaScript. We also used a SmoothScroll technology so that the navigation stays really nice and soft. We used a CMS for the News section so that the client can edit a few things.