The Art of Commercial Photography

Murray Fredericks is a multi-award winning photographer and cinematographer whose work has been exhibited around the world in galleries including the Louvre and at over 50 film festivals. He has earned a reputation for his work in photographing subjects that are too large for conventional studio lighting, being named Australian Landscape Photographer of the year in 2010.

 

When Deepend were engaged to design the official Murray Fredericks website, the brief was to successfully showcase his larger-than-life artwork to potential buyers and gallery curators. The site needed to look clean, simple and beautiful to be congruous with his unique style of photography. It also needed to be intuitive to navigate by a non-technically minded audience, including use on touch screen interfaces such as iPads. Finally, the website needed to enable Murray to upload and manage his portfolio on the fly from remote locations around the world.

Deepend created a minimalist design that showcases the artwork as the hero of the website design. A light, clean frame contrasts with the bold colour of the images themselves, and sleek HTML5 transitions give the website a flowing, graceful feel.

 

As the preferred device for the affluent buyers that form the target audience, accessibility on iPads was a key requirement. It also enabled Murray to showcase his video documentary on an iPads within an exhibition setting.

 

From a content management standpoint, a simple interface coupled with training and documentation enabled Murray to manage the website whilst on his artistic journeys.

The newly launched Murray Fredericks website was hailed as a success by the client as well as end users across the board. This was reflected in usage statistics, showing that the clean design encouraged site visitors to view more artworks, with page views increasing by 38% as compared to the same period in the previous year.

 

As well as increasing engagement for existing users, the new website also generated higher organic and direct traffic volumes, with site visits increasing by a staggering 167% YoY.