Wedding photography and video

The client

Vaše Lovestory is a duo of professional wedding photographers and video creators that wanted to have their own website to market their services. They also wanted to use the website to show their portfolio in a modern and accessible way.

Assignment

The client wanted to convey the beauty they capture during the weddings and their unique and personal approach to each one, preferring a clean style focused on photography. During our discovery sessions, we found out that they want to come across as outgoing, easy to talk to couple that not only takes pictures, but also helps managing certain activities during the wedding day (like the bridal preparations, collective photoshoots etc.).

My approach

As I listened to the client's wishes and got to know them, I realized an important fact - a potential customer of theirs, in most cases a stressed future bride who has already seen a dozen wedding photography websites, would probably choose the photographers based on these factors:

• "Does the website feel calm? I don't need any more stress in my life right now."
• "Do their photos look great?"
• "Do they tell me everything I need to know right now, like how do they work, when will I get the result, how many pictures will I get...?"
• "Will they be another stress-producing factor at my wedding or will they help calm things down?"

With these in mind, I defined a calm and clear brand identity, with elegant serif type, off-white background with soft paper texture and an elegant main color. I then proceeded to wireframe the website around telling their story - who they are, how they work, what they deliver. I included space for a decent portfolio that shows a great deal of variety on one hand, but is not overwhelming to the viewer on the other. For the design itself, I went with interactivity and a great amount of beatiful photos to support the feeling the client wanted to convey.

Special note

The portfolio gallery turned out to be a challenge. Of course, it uses CMS to dynamically construct a page for each one of the presented weddings. Inside each wedding, there was supposed to be about 50 photos. But, I wanted to give the client complete freedom in their presentation, without forcing them into presenting images in specific aspect ratios and at the same time presenting the images in a way worthy of the images' beauty. Dynamically creating and tiling the image grid turned out to be quite a technical challenge, because presenting images in a CMS grid, with 3 images per row, with no control over their size and aspect ratio, is an intriguing problem.

Fully booked and independent

The website now serves as their business card, portfolio, service presentation and helps them attract new customers into their flourishing and always fully booked business. For me personally, this project pushed the boundaries of my knowledge of CMS and various little tricks that make the result look polished, and also in teaching the clients to manage their content themselves - while I'm always close to my clients even after finishing the project, my aim always is for the client to be completely independent.