Julia Quance Art
The web has provided artists with a great new medium to exhibit their work; making their creations more discoverable than ever before. It is a fantastic opportunity for art lovers to share and discover new art and artists, they may never have discovered otherwise.
It is, therefore, all the more disappointing to see website after website fail to present the work of artists properly.
Flash animations, pop-up windows and an over insistence on using thumbnails, all hinder our ability to see the art as we tangle ourselves in these navigational nightmares. Then, in an attempt to protect the art work from 'theft', many sites ruin the images by either making them so small they are not worth looking at, or adding watermarks.
These websites fail in their fundamental task: to act as a point of discovery for new art.
I was determined that Julia Quance's artwork would receive better treatment.
You can see the result at juliaquance.com
...or continue reading about the design and some behind the scenes insights.
The Design
I thought designing a website for an artist would be easy. After all, the artwork already looked good, so I thought I could just put it on the page and it would almost present itself. That didn't turn out to be the case. I quickly found out that it's easy to do too little, and it's extremely easy to do to much and overwhelm the art.
In an attempt to get the right balance, I drew much inspiration from the design of brick and mortar art galleries. No matter the tone of the work, white walls and plenty of spacing help show off the paintings well.
A wide spacious design is not always the best option, of course. But when the styles and colours are diverse, as in Julia Quance's work, the white is always a great choice.
Looking at the final result, it is difficult to see how I struggled with the design; it is so simple and subtle. But that is exactly how I know I've succeeded; for simplicity is often the hardest thing to achieve.
If I've done my job right, visitors will notice the artwork and not the site.
Behind the Scenes
I know from experience that if adding content is a chore, there is a reluctance to add anything new. I therefore wanted to make adding new paintings to the gallery as easy as possible.
As part of this process I made two things automatic.
First, the images are automatically resized to fit in with the layout of the site. This meant that there was no need to resize the images in an image editing program before uploading.
Second, I made the HTML code that surrounded the images automatic. There are basically two types of images on the site: portrait and landscape. Depending on the dimensions of the image the supporting text and styling would have to appear differently. This is all worked out in code automatically.
This means to add a new image you simply have to upload the image, and fill in the title, width, height and medium into the appropriate input boxes.
Nice and simple.