Beyond Templates
There are millions of templates out there for photographers and it’s really refreshing when a client recognises the limitations of this approach.
Pip’s images are unique and deserve a fitting platform. Pip came to us because he knew what he wanted and rejected the off-the-shelf solution.
The Medium Is The Message
There’s always a risk that the apparatus of a user interface will interfere with the communication of the content. In order to let Pip’s images do the talking we needed a minimal UI. What we built doesn’t simply house Pip’s work, but encourages the user to explore image after image.
Technical Challenges
When you are displaying so many images on a web page there are a number of challenges. The page is inherently going to load slower than a page containing predominantly text – how do we reduce the impact especially for mobile users?
You can resample images to make them smaller, but at what cost in image quality? A reduction in image quality in this case was not acceptable.
The solution is to think carefully about the sizes of the images we are serving, and only serve those that are stricly needed at any given time.
This means “lazy loading” images only when they are in the viewport, loading up more as the user scrolls down the page, and loading in high quality versions on the fly when the user clicks on a thumbnail.