Jean Marc – Artist/Entrepreneur, Tribangha
Jean-Marc Huss is renowned as one of the leading painters globally of Buddhist and oriental images. Each painting has an exceptional level of detail and texture which is his signature
Jean-Marc’s existing website was ageing and quite a complicated journey for users to find information. We researched the market and saw that many artist’s websites were similar, badly designed and a bad showcase for the artist and their work.
Which is a shame as such a visual skill demands to be showcased correctly and there is so much scope to throw the rules out and let creativity take over for the website, which is a dream for most designers.
We had full rein to be as creative as possible so we decided to throw out some best practices and make the website more of a journey of discovery, surrounded with beautiful imagery. We wanted to perfectly combine classic design reflecting timeless art with flourishes of modern reflecting the medium and the fact Jean-Marc also had an outrageous streak to his non-classical artwork
For us the 2 key things we wanted to highlight were:
Our approach to web design
We approach producing websites using a very professional process. As a quick aside, so many designers jump straight into the design part, presenting you with effectively the finished version of the site, not even sharing a sketch with the client.
This is such an incorrect way of producing a website for so many reasons. These include:
We could go on. In short, if a designer does not feature at least some level of sketching out all the elements of the website in their proposal then walk away. Unless you’re paying them peanuts in which case you get what you pay for (normally an ugly, frustrating, non-converting website that is immediately dated).
The process
Back to the process…so doing this the correct way we start with a style guide laying out all the colours, fonts, usage etc
Then we map the navigation out in depth to make sure it is as efficient and logical as possible for users. You know those websites with huge navigation menus full of meaningless categories where you don’t know where to even begin? We’re aiming for the opposite effect here – clarity.
We then sketch out basic all the various pages and even go the extra mile to create a functioning online model of the site to give an idea of how the big picture will look. We are very much interested in the user journey and navigation here rather than specific design elements. It can be torn down and ripped apart with ease, it’s just to get the creative juices flowing
We then discuss our ideas with the client before moving to the next stage
Now we are all agreed on the overall strucutre of the site, it’s time to start adding in the artwork and other visual materials. We do this as both sketches and again a skeleton online version with limited functionality. In addition we start planning on how it will look on mobile and tablets.
Once we sign off on this then we build the site, which we can do with the confidence that the client is fully behind our vision.
Et voila, the final result
A great result
We were all very happy with the final site and think it is one of the best looking artist sites we have seen, a great combination of design and functionality.
Jean-Marc and ourselves are in agreement that we want to push the creative boundaries even further to make the site truly a work of art. To do this we need to create more hand drawn illustrations for the site which will require a lot of thought and work but we’re looking forward to the next phase of this project
Jean Marc was so happy with our work, he also commissioned us to create a social media research project to investigate the viability of using social media to sell his artwork
Jean Marc – Artist/Entrepreneur, Tribangha