Yesterday we published a beautiful new layout for the Work section at Alison Milne Design. A big improvement over the initial version, this new design allows Alison to easily manage her portfolio and provides a smooth, organic experience for visitors to her site.

The design was arrived at through a couple of meetings with Alison where we discussed the importance of her being able to control the content of her portfolio on her own and broad ideas of how to divide that content into logical, digestible sections. From that point, I went into my lab and started creating.

From a design standpoint, my minimalist leanings and the current cleanliness of the site design pushed me toward creating a grid. We had decided on a three level hierarchy, landing page, project overview, and ending at project details. After a bit of playing I found a natural progression where as detail increases, the block sizes decrease accordingly.

From there, I did a lot of research into image gallery plugins for WordPress. I was looking for something that had a lot of features and flexibility, particularly in terms of establishing albums and galleries visually, as well as image resizing, but more importantly, I was looking for something that was easy to use for the average user. I ultimately landed on the NextGen Gallery (which I was initially skeptical about because of the somewhat goofy name), which provided most of these features out of the box. After playing with it for a while, I ended up making a few customizations to the plugin to simplify the workflow for Alison, and wired it up to the designs I had created.

Overall, I think that the design works really well with the site and gives Alison a lot more flexibility to define which of her many amazing projects will be featured on her site at any given time.

Check it out and let me know what you think.