ejdruphansen.dk website design

The website of Danish media artist Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen. The site features a large portfolio of artworks in different media.

I produced the website design, as well as the back-end content management system, as a freelance assignment from the artist.

The task posed several challenges that made it fundamentally different from most web design projects: there was a large amount of heterogeneous material - mostly images, but also text, video, and artwork. These were often interconnected, complementing each other, so that one could not simply place the text on one page and a photo gallery on another. Furthermore, as an artists website, the site could not rely on formulaic web design or common design patterns - it needed to represent the unique character of the artist, preferrably by honouring the source material and without resorting to web gimmicks such as flash animation or huge navigation sections.

The solution to both problems came in the form of the Line - a persistent motif in Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansens work. By organising the page layouts along a horizontal line, each page would underline and compliment the identity expressed in the artworks. Horizontal layouts are un-common on the web, but they work well for photography and art - which is often displayed and "read" in a left-right direction (rather than the top-down direction of text) on gallery walls.

The huge amount of content made it impractical to author the website in static HTML. A single design change (e.g. a new item in the navigation) would require manually editing hundreds of documents. Instead, I wrote a content management system in PHP - with features to handle different horizontal layouts - in order to publish and maintain the website.

The website was published in 2004 and is still on-line, with more content having been added subsequent to publication.