A portfolio that gets out of the photographs’ way.
A documentary photographer with fifteen years of work trapped behind a grid of thumbnails and a slow lightbox plugin.
Services
- Art direction
- Design
- Build
- Copy
The problem
The existing site loaded eleven megabytes of full-resolution JPEGs on the home page and showed a spinner for four seconds before a single image appeared. Commissioning editors — the entire audience — were bouncing before the work rendered. The photographs were extraordinary and effectively invisible.
What we did
- 01
Stripped the interface to almost nothing: no chrome over the images, no captions until you ask for them, no hover effects competing with the frame.
- 02
Rebuilt the image pipeline around AVIF with responsive srcset, so a phone downloads a phone-sized file instead of a print-sized one.
- 03
Made the first image the LCP element and preloaded it, so the page opens on a photograph rather than on empty space.
- 04
Added a quiet, keyboard-driven lightbox — arrow keys, escape to close, no library.
Outcome
The home page now paints its first photograph in under a second on a mid-range phone, and the full gallery weighs less than a single image did before.
- Largest Contentful Paint
- 0.7s
- Home page weight
- 11MB → 0.4MB
- Lighthouse performance
- 100