Brief
Artist Sophie Marchant and photographer Tillmann Pretscher asked Nucleus to design a website for their collaboration, Forgotten Beauties, which features original large format artworks of common, rare and endangered insects, with their individual back stories written by renowned entomologist, Peter Pretscher. The website needed to feature the brand mark designed by Tillmann and display the artworks in close-up detail.
Solution
Our design solution captures our client’s brief with the user experience focused on exploring the artworks. The home page scrolls to reveal full screen snapshots of several insects from the collection, which fade into each other using an effortless parallax motion. The Gallery reveals the collection as a visual menu, but then the individual artwork pages feature each painting with a thorough explanation of the insect, its distribution, habitat and way of life, including its contribution to its natural ecology. A map also illustrates where each insect can be found.
Typography is classical and understated with ample white space to allow images and text to co-exist in mutual balance. Every user control feels frictionless.
We recommended Umbraco as the content management platform, for its excellent feature set, ease-of-use and free licensing model. Hosting is in Nucleus’ private cloud using Cloudflare’s content distribution network.
Results
Given the website was launched at the end of October 2020 it is still very early days, but early feedback has been very positive, with Sophie Marchant saying “Nucleus has delivered an exquisite website which certainly brings our collection to life online. The execution and attention to detail have been first class and we are confident this will help us to establish Forgotten Beauties with collectors and draw attention to the importance of insects to the planet’s ecology.”
Take a private view at ForgottenBeauties.com