Silence over ornament.
One serif face, one grotesque. One accent color. No script. No decorative frames. Every design decision had to earn its place against the argument for less.
Case Study · 2024 · Photography · Web
The workdoes the work.
Photography portfolios lose because they templated. Watermarked thumbnails. Ornate scripts. Chrome around the images instead of stage under them. This build is the opposite — a slow, cinematic room with one job: show the photograph.
EnterThe Brief
The category was templated. This one refused.
The photographer had the work — years of nature, landscape, architecture, and animal photography across the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies. What they didn't have was a room to show it in. The old site was a Squarespace template with thumbnail grids, watermarks over every image, script fonts, and every image cropped to the same 4:3 tile. Prospective clients scrolled past. The rebuild had to do one thing: get out of the way so the photography could actually be seen.
- Client
- Josh The Wanderer
- Discipline
- Nature · Architecture · Animal
- Services
- Strategy, UX, UI, Front-End, Motion
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Marketing Director · Lead
The Approach
Six moves that reset the room.
Category defaults are the cheapest thing a portfolio can inherit and the most expensive thing to keep. We dropped all of them.
Full-bleed, always.
Photographs run edge to edge. No consistent thumbnail crop. Each image gets the aspect the photographer chose in-camera, and no template flattens that back into a grid.
The cursor is the interface.
Hover reveals metadata. Click opens the lightbox. Keyboard navigates. No captions cluttering the image, no chrome competing for attention.
No watermarks.
Watermarks announce insecurity. The work stands unmarked. Attribution lives in the site's presence, the domain, and the deliberate visual language — not stamped into the frame.
Load-in as choreography.
Scroll motion is orchestrated, not decorative. Images reveal on soft masks. The nav retreats. The room stays still while the work moves.
Booking as a conversation, not a form.
The booking flow reads as a short letter — three questions, one CTA, a real reply from a real person. No date picker anxiety, no calendar tetris, no pricing dropdown before the trust is built.
The Collections
One system. Three bodies of work.
Each collection carries its own tint and pace — one shared cinematic backbone underneath. Tap a collection to move through the room.
N°01Nature
Nature
Landscape. Weather. Light.
The primary body of work. Mountains, coasts, forests, waterfalls, night skies — shot across the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies. Sixteen selected frames in this collection; scroll inside the frame to move through them.
The Room — Extended
Selected frames across collections.
A curated mix showing the scope of the work — landscape leading, architecture and animal following. Every image runs at its own aspect, edge to edge, no watermarks.
Have work that deserves this kind of room?
Let's build the next one.
Brand, digital, motion, and the disciplined restraint to leave the work alone when the work is the point. If that's the conversation you're trying to have, this is where it starts.