What Susan needed

Susan is a cultural writer, critic, and editor who is interested in contemporary art, architecture and urbanism outside the mainstream. After several teaching and professional affiliations, she’s currently hit a point in her career and life where she’d like to focus on her identity as an independent professional.

To support this career refocus, Susan was in need of a new website to give more visibility to her writing, editorial projects, and editing services. It needed to properly convey her position as a thought leader in her industry, as well as consolidate her various works and words into a central location that highlights her talents and expertise. It also needs to indicate upcoming events that Susan is involved in.

Our solutions

The design challenge for Susan’s site was an interesting one! As many of her written reflections are about art pieces, Susan’s site itself had to be quite lean on a “style” so as not to clash with the diverse different artworks she is profiling and displaying within her content. Since most of the imagery on the site would be coming from the art recently written about, the style of the images themselves would be consistently changing and not within any specific color palette or style.

Jessica went with a website design style, then, that is deliberately simple but makes the most of the little details. A bold red gives the site a pop of Susan’s personality and keeps it from being too neutral, while the judicious use of white space and alignment choices adds dynamic appeal. Non-fussy typeface choices serve up Susan’s musings on “art occupying the margins” in a clear, thoughtful way. Susan can now write content profiling any exhibit or artwork and feel confident her website will be able to display it beautifully, no matter what colors or textures or mood the art itself contains.

Susan has a lot of past writings that have been published in various other art journals and online publications. We consolidated them here, designing the new site as a “hub” where the visitor can peruse the various writings from a central, visual list. Lastly, we made sure the new site has ways for Susan to communicate upcoming speaking and other events, as well as a way for visitors to contact her.

With her new site from Blustery Day Design, Susan was set to increase the visibility of her writing and interest in the services she offers.