Elsa Chartin
textile artist & designer
design
information architecture
copy
webflow development
Challenges & Goals
Elsa Chartin is a textile artist and designer with an international career. Her previous website didn't reflect the level of her art and design work anymore. Our goals were:
a clean showcase of Elsa’s excellent art and design work
portraying her unique personality: she is a humble human with a distinct creative process
conveying trust and authority to those considering hiring her
a fast loading time despite a lot of high quality pictures, and the use of a friendly Content Management System (CMS) in order for her to update the content herself easily.
Solutions
A clean showcase: minimalism
Emulating an art gallery or a museum, we needed to minimize distractions and put the spotlights on her work. We went for a minimalistic style:
menu hidden behind one simple button.
color scheme: understated shades of grey in order to make the art stand out
interaction color: a trendy desaturated yellow taken from one of the artworks for consistency and familiarity
plenty of whitespace for a sense of bareness and essentiality
Crucial to me was to showcase only one project per screen, to limit the cognitive load, but most importantly to give each project the attention they deserve. These projects were never meant to be seen together on one page.
Following the same train of thoughts, each photograph showing details of a project was to be shown in a lightbox, that is, in full screen and with a dark background, to make it pop.
I also discreetly reproduced her visual language, playing with layers and transparency in the design.
Character: candor & simplicity
Elsa is a modern and humble being who wants to be on equal footing with her fellow humans.
we chose a humanist font
her name is written completely in lowercase
we added her creative process in her own words on each project page
simple and personal tone of copywriting, talking in the first person. The message is told efficiently and with a friendly voice.
featuring her work in progress prominently as a sign of her simplicity and transparency, in a page called “extra” to give it a bonus quality.
Trust and authoriy: achievements and social proof
Elsa has an impressive CV with many invitations to the far corners of the world, solo exhibitions and public commissions. That in itself is a testament to her quality as an artist. Updating her CV was a number one priority, as well as presenting it in bite size chunks so as to avoid a dreaded wall of text that nobody would wants to read.
In her portfolio, we curated the most relevant projects and added reviews and testimonials to provide strong social proof.
result
A modern and dynamic website that showcased Elsa’s artistry and achievements with humility.
If that speaks to you, let's chat!