Tribangha

About This Project

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:

• The work itself, especially the level of detail and texture
• The story of Jean-Marc. He had a fascinating background, having spent the last 30 years living all over Asia with a never ending series of mind blowing experiences. These were all channeled back into his work

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:

• It makes final changes so much harder to implement and if the client hates the concept this can cause serious friction
• To start with, It is much better to see the individual elements of the site laid out in detail separately, such as a complete map of the navigation or all the steps from checkout to purchase, so they can be considered in depth before being committed to the site build and at the same time it makes it much easier to see how they fit into the big picture
• It is much easier to brainstorm and share ideas. You can put ideas up and tear them down very quickly. This is much harder and more time consuming to do on a finished site
• We are paid to be the website experts and that’s what we do but the website is reflection of our client. If they don’t want to be involved in the process, that is completely fine and some people prefer this scenario. But many clients love to be involved in the process and can help us really dig to the core of the business and help bring this out on the site.
• Mobile and tablet experience (which can be as much as 70% of traffic) can be completely overlooked by which point it is too late or requires a huge amount of extra work. They must be considered from the beginning as often a different experience is required

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

What Tribangha had to say:

I have worked with Dan across several projects now, including a website build and social media research project with some more in the pipeline. I have been very happy with the results and found Dan to be highly professional in all my dealings with him. If you are looking for an expert who not only understands marketing but how to run a business then I highly recommend Dan.

Jean Marc – Artist/Entrepreneur, Tribangha