Challenges

• The client, a gifted up-and-coming photographer of urban landscapes, had little online presence outside of Instagram.
• An online store to sell prints needed to be built from scratch or use commercial APIs.
• The client's work is scheduled to be featured in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Therefore a responsively-designed photo gallery would be needed for both through-travelers that would look him up on their mobile phones as well as other visitors that would be using larger screens to view high resolution versions of his works.
• An photo gallery should exhibit the artist's work elegantly without coming off as overly commercial; The design and functionality should not detract from the work, preserving and highlighting the artist's trademark deadpan aesthetic.

Impact

Helped the client save over $500 a year, eliminating a large cost hurdle to starting his business and promoting his works.

• Set up an account for the client as a Shopify Partner, then leveraged Shopify’s GraphQL API to build a website.
• This allowed the client to eliminate Shopify's online store altogether and use the cheapest pricing tier. The client paid less than 1/3 of the service fees had he used Shopify's full-featured service.
• Utilizing Shopify's CDN for static assets allowed the client to eliminate any additional costs besides the minimal hosting of the source code.

Developed and deployed a fast, performant, static photo gallery.

• Deployed Next.js static export builds to provide fast user experience.
• Set up continuous integration processes using webhooks, pushing deployments automatically upon the client's modifications to the Shopify backend. This removed the need for me to push updates manually when changes are made to the product database and preserved the fast, ultralight speed of a static website.

Designed a fully responsive, minimalist photo gallery that can be accessed on any screen size.

• I felt the author's trademark aesthetic (described as "deadpan," a cool, detached, and unemotional presentation of a subject) could best be presented in a minimalist design absent of lines, buttons, graphics, and other common baubles.
• Achieved Accessibility score of 100 on Lighthouse