Visually match Elena's personal style

The design needed to be as elegant and clean as possible. I chose a serif font that felt like one you’d see in a fashion newspaper, and plenty of negative space ensures that the pictures do not fight with each other for attention. I also used very muted colors to keep the focus on the saturated ones in Elena’s photos.

Elegant and simple

The visual design on Elena’s website needed to fit Elena’s personal style. I wanted a 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 informations about Elena and a series page that shows every picture of a project. 

Dive in the series

I 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. I believe that it makes you dive into that series deeply and right from the beginning. I 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.

Hold & Drag to have an overview of the photos

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.

Gallery component to stay in the browsing flow

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.

Elena's personal space

Elena needed a space where she could show a few links to reach her, talk about herself, her style, her client as well as her awards. This is where the about page came handy.

The crucial importance of the mobile website

Since Elena's 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.

Collaborate closely with an amazing artist

It was great to visually represent the photographic style of Elena Iv-Skaya thanks to our discussion about how she sees her work and how she approaches every new project. 

Finding the perfect quality/size balance for all the pictures

Obviously, Elena’s photos are the most important part of the website, and there are a lot of them. I tried quite a few sizes and quality exports to find the perfect balance that will not reduce the quality of Elena’s work while still giving us a website fast to load. 

Working with my brother

My brother Raphael Noguier is a front-end developer yet we had never worked together. He was available at that time and really excited about building a new portfolio for Elena so we worked together and that was amazing! 

Did we just click 📸?

Hit me up at noguier.robin@gmail.com and let's make some design magic happen!