Denise Vilela is a interior designer from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She works closely with families, transforming dreams into reality when it comes to house decor.
I was commissioned to redesign her website, first developed back in the early 2000's. Unfortunatelly, in her process of changing domains and web hosting, the old design was lost, but here I show how I created her portfolio in a minimalist way.
It's interesting to point that, Denise works in Minas Gerais, a state of Brazil where the the modern style of decor can easily be mixed and matched with some antique, ranch style. So it's understandable why she had a necessity of a minimalist portfolio.
It's interesting to point that, Denise works in Minas Gerais, a state of Brazil where the the modern style of decor can easily be mixed and matched with some antique, ranch style. So it's understandable why she had a necessity of a minimalist portfolio.
Brief: Redesign the website to be a minimalist portfolio. The photography should be the center of every project and the homepage should look like a wide gallery.
Solution: One of my main concerns were the speed of the website, considering the photos should look sharp but most of them would be full width. So I optimize the photos to have less than mb each. I created the website using Wordpress and Elementor builder. Denise had another designer working on a new logo for her, so I made sure to use a similar web font for title and the same colour.
My first step was to check all the projects she planned add to the website, and separate them into categories. So I created a flowchart to present to her so she could approve and understand better how the website should work.
My second step was to create some low fidelity wireframes. After some reviews, the final website looked a little bit different than the wireframes, but this step was quite important for them to understand how the user journey would flow.
Here is a video from the final website inside a project page. I decided to use a feature that helps the user know how long the page is, since there are many images to each project. The copy is very minimal, but good enough to credit all the stakeholders and to make sure the locations with city and neighborhoods as H1 could be SEO friendly.
