Redesigning Mika Ninagawa's Website Feb 24 2007
Pulled together just in time for the opening day of Mika's debut feature film, the site has been completely renewed from the ground up.
I was asked to design the original site back in 2003, and the goal was to create an online "Mika's world" — to immerse the user in her photography as deeply as possible. I consequently spent a long time selecting photographs to use as backgrounds to page contents, so that even on text-heavy pages, the photograph would be the foundation of the page. But of course if you can't read the text due to too much noise, the background's no good, so it placed considerable restriction on what I could and couldn't use.
I was really pleased with the end result, though upon reflection, forcing content into iFrames and the like to maintain the photographs' integrity made content difficult to read at times. This time I wanted to try a very different approach — completely separating the photos from the text, to get the both of best worlds — the use of any photo, and good readability. We've tried to do this by providing brief "splash pages" before the content — using Flash to scale photographs to 100% browser width, showing them for a second or two, then following on to html pages with plain backgrounds and slivers of the splash photos as accents. I'm not totally convinced we've got the best balance here; essentially we've created a several second buffer to each page's content, which is slightly dubious. Having said this, the majority of users coming to the site are coming to enjoy the photography, and will hopefully see the splash pages as a positive addition to the experience. Only time will tell!
Another big change to the site is the colour scheme — back in 2003 I was convinced that a white background would be the best way to show off the photographs, but after having visited several of Mika's recent exhibitions where she's moved away from white walls, I wasn't so sure. The new site's all black, and if I may say it the photographs look absolutely gorgeous against it. With a white background (where the monitor is at its brightest), the white space surrounding the photos is like glare — it tires your eyes and lessens the impact of the colours in the photographs. Black on the other hand is the monitor at its most silent, letting the photographs shine and the colours really stand out.
We've also finally put together an English site (though it doesn't have as much content as the Japanese version) and created a corner promoting Mika's mobile site which is very popular out here. Hopefully lots more additions and tweaks in the coming weeks, but for the meantime, have a look and let me know your thoughts.
Ninagawa Mika's Official Website »
Post on designing the original 2003 site »