Velour

On a commission the design is somebody else’s decision and the brief settles the arguments. Building a product for my own marketplace removes both: every judgement is mine, and the only test is whether a studio owner sees it and thinks that is how their work should be presented. For a luxury photography site that is a hard target, because the temptation is to add and the requirement is to remove.

The work is the argument, so everything else gets out of its way. Four campaigns with location and date rather than captions, four service categories, a named founder with credentials, and a journal that reads as editorial instead of SEO filler. The type does the heavy lifting — a serif display face against a mono accent, on generous space — which is only possible because nothing underneath it is imposing opinions of its own.

• Selected work as four campaigns, each with location and date rather than a caption
• Four service categories, client logos, and a founder profile with credentials
• A journal of three articles, an Instagram feed and a closing enquiry call to action
• Cormorant Garamond and Italiana for display, Montserrat and Space Mono for the rest

The only third-party dependency is the font stack. No Bootstrap, no jQuery, no plugin bundle — three stylesheets and three scripts, written for this layout, which is what keeps a site this typographic from carrying somebody else’s defaults:

• HTML5
• CSS3
• Vanilla JavaScript
• Google Fonts

It sells through Codexse rather than being handed to one client and finished. That changes what “done” means: a commission ends at sign-off, while a template has to keep making sense to buyers I never speak to, on sites I never see.