Gemma Malenoir Photography
A gallery-grade site for a wildlife & documentary photographer — hand-built so the photographs lead and nothing gets in their way.
This one isn't live yet. The site is built and in final review while Gemma finishes selecting the photographs for her print collections. The screenshots below are from the working build; I'll link through to the finished site the day it launches.
The brief
Gemma Malenoir photographs wildlife and wild places — conservation stories that have run from the street herons of Amsterdam to the rainforests of Borneo, and covers for titles like Life Nature Magazine. Work of that calibre needs a website that behaves like a gallery: the images hold every bit of the colour, and the site itself gets quietly out of the way.
She needed one place to do several things well — sell fine-art print collections, show a portfolio meant to be seen rather than sold, present her published features, and open the door to commission and expedition work. A template was never going to do it: they compress photographs, load slowly, and make every photographer's site look like every other one.
The build
A bespoke site on a dark, editorial canvas — designed and hand-coded from scratch, no template and no page-builder. Restrained type and generous space frame the work; a full-screen film of a wolf opens the homepage before giving way to the print collections. Every part of the interface is there to serve the photography and then disappear.
The site behaves like a gallery — calm, considered, and quietly technical under the surface.
Under the hood
Photography that loads instantly
Next-generation AVIF images with WebP fallbacks, each served at the right size for the screen it lands on, with fonts and the hero preloaded and everything else lazy-loaded. Big, rich photographs that appear the moment you arrive.
Print collections, built to sell
Her collections are structured to be browsed and bought, and to grow as new expeditions come back — a foundation for print sales rather than a static gallery.
Accessible by design
Skip links, properly labelled navigation and clean semantic structure — so the site works for everyone and reads clearly to search engines at the same time.
Found online, shared beautifully
Structured data, Open Graph and Twitter cards and canonical URLs throughout, so Gemma's work surfaces properly in search and looks right the moment it's shared.
Motion with restraint
Content reveals gently as you scroll — a site with a pulse, never a circus.
Built to last
Hand-written HTML and CSS with no plugins to break — fast to load, cheap to run, and simple to look after year on year.
Where it stands
What's built feels like Gemma's work — calm, considered and quietly technical underneath. It's fast, it reads clearly to search engines, it's set up to sell prints and to pitch her for commissions, and it's made to be looked after rather than torn down and rebuilt every couple of years.
The build is complete and in final review. Once the print collections are populated and the site is live, I'll add the launch link and the numbers that come with it.