Series, Not Grids

On saleTwo Editions are on sale today, Les Gourmands and Aperture Office. Complete React source, the original photography included. Single licence 89 USD, one published website. Studio licence 179 USD, up to five.

Why the grid loses the edit

• Most photography templates are built on a masonry or square grid, because a grid is cheap to code and it never visibly breaks. The cost is that a 4x5 portrait, a 6x7 frame and a long horizontal all arrive at the same size, and the distinction you spent years learning to see is flattened in the first scroll.
• A grid also destroys order. An edit has an opening frame, a turn somewhere in the middle and a closing frame, and a layout that reflows from three columns to one changes that order every time the viewport changes.
• Cropping to a common ratio is the second failure. A template that fills a fixed cell will centre crop the file, which is the one operation a photographer never hands to software.
• Uniform spacing is the third. Two frames that belong together should sit closer than two frames that argue with each other, and a grid gives every gap the same value, so every relationship reads the same.
• Then the hover overlay arrives, a title in white sans directly on the picture. At that moment the photograph stops being the subject and becomes a card in a catalogue.

A series, and the single frame

• A series is a page, not a folder. It opens on one image, holds a short text of sixty to a hundred and twenty words, then runs the sequence in the order you set and nobody else can reflow.
• Full bleed, two up, and offset pairs are three different rhythms, and a photographer uses all three in one body of work. The layout logic lets a quiet frame sit small against white while a decisive frame takes the whole viewport.
• Order is stored as an explicit field in the CMS, not inferred from upload date. Re editing a series becomes dragging rows in the collection, not rebuilding a page.
• Portrait and landscape frames keep their own ratio inside the same series. Nothing is normalised, so a vertical and a panoramic can sit on the same scroll without either being trimmed to agree with the other.
• A single image deserves its own page type. One frame, a place, a year, a caption, and an entry that indexes on its own is a legitimate object, and it is often the picture people actually search for.

Galleries on a phone

Captions, credits, client and personal

• Captions are CMS fields, not text you retype into a layout. Place, year and a note, rendered in the same small type on every page, so the whole site stays consistent when you add work at midnight.
• Credits for commissioned work are structured, one field each for client, agency, art direction, styling and production. They render in a fixed order and they stay legible, which matters when an art buyer is checking who you have already worked with.
• Client work and personal work belong in one collection with a type field, not two disconnected sections. One navigation, one index, and a filter, so a commissioner can see the commercial strand without losing the reason they liked you.
• Print enquiries need their own form: image reference, print size, edition, shipping country. The reference travels with the message, so you are not searching a gallery to work out which frame someone means.
• Licensing enquiries need four answers before you can quote: image, usage, territory, duration. A form that asks for them turns a vague message into a sentence you can price the same day.
• Alt text is a separate field you write yourself. A caption and a description for a screen reader are different sentences with different work to do, and search engines read the second one.

Status and the price grid

Related