Phil Price Sculpture web design

Eight year location photography project documenting Phil Price’s kinetic works, culminating in portfolio website

Phil Price is a successful New Zealand sculptor who has achieved international renown for his kinetic works. Phil approached me to design a dynamic brand identity and a responsive catalogue website to his exacting creative brief. Upholding the perceptions and reputations of Phil Price the artist and his works is the great accomplishment of this clean minamilist site.

A custom WordPress template made to fit an exacting artist’s brief

The branding brief was for a Personal or individual brand, built around Phil personally, as a fine artist and sculptor. To that end his primary url was renamed from philprice.co.nz to philpricescultpure.com. It was also mandated that all forms of commercial branding that had been developed in the past would be absent from the redesigned catalogue website and career biography project. The project kicked off with the design and build of a fully custom WordPress template.

The enigma: Great branding does not make a great artist

As a fine artist Price must walk a tightrope in the manner he portrays and markets himself via the media because the business side of the art world, loyal patrons, art galleries, dealers and the like must be inscrutable, mysterious.

So it is arguable whether this is a form of brand because while it aims to add value to Phil’s oeuvre it lacks a business model to commercialise the strategy.

Yet it makes perfect sense in context because the fine art world holds it to be a truism that great branding does not make a great artist. So while there are some great artists with great branding, the enigma of a catalogue website of Price’s work in its opacity is a statement and an expression of confidence. The website is a work of art for arts sake.

As the rebranding and repositioning project was web based, as per the site name and the sculptural work’s provenance, upholding the perceptions and reputations of Phil Price the artist and his works is the great accomplishment of the site. An attractive and useful showcase for quality photography and videos of his kinetic sculptural oeuvre was the goal.

As part of the UX development I created a set of small custom symbols to give clarity to the different categories of information attached to each sculptural work. Much care and attention was devoted to developing a versatile HD format for presenting video of his works that would allow older, low resolution hand-held footage to be displayed along with more recent HD video. Care optimising the site’s presentation on mobile devices. If you think a responsive website redesign might be a good strategy for your firm contact me here.

Kinetics photography portfolio

This 2015 portfolio website design project was the culmination of the Phil Price Sculpture Kinetics photography collaboration between myself and Phil Price (Phil Price Sculpture and MagentaDot Brands) that began in January 2006. This documentary photography project shooting his works in public and private collections in New Zealand and Australia is a work in progress that aims to progressively document both Price’s completed works and selected work methodologies.

TAKE A LOOK AT THE KINETICS PHOTOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO

Credits

Bespoke WordPress Template project management: MagentaDot Brands
Template customisation: Webbymonks
Back-end support: nuweb designs