Studio Jan Henrik Hansen website
Jan Henrik Hansen builds striking sound sculptures. My job was to put them full-frame, then get the interface out of the way.
This was the second iteration of the studio's website, following a major redesign in 2010, for Studio Jan Henrik Hansen in Zurich. The brief was reduction to the minimum: strip the interface back and let it scale down into the background as far as it would go, so the sculptures sit in full-frame format and do all the talking.
The 2010 version had been built as a fullscreen concept, back when responsive web design was still largely unused. As it turned out, it scaled down to iPhone and iPad beautifully, with almost no alterations. Responsive more or less by accident.
Under the hood it runs on WordPress 3.4, with almost every part of the theme and admin section heavily modified. The grid on the front page is a custom jQuery script: rather than forcing a fixed layout, it scales each thumbnail towards an “ideal aspect ratio” so that full rows and columns are always displayed. Yes, sometimes math is also part of designing.
Reduce the interface to the minimum, then let it scale into the background.