guide
What separates an artist site that works from one that just exists
Artists are handed the same advice as small businesses, and it does not fit. A restaurant needs a menu and an address. A body of work needs somewhere to live for a decade, in a form that survives whichever platform is currently fashionable.
These are the decisions that determine whether a site is still useful in five years.
The archive is the product
Most artist sites are built around whatever is current and treat the back catalogue as an afterthought. It is the wrong way round. The archive is what accumulates value, and the structure it is given at the start determines whether it stays navigable when there is ten times as much of it.
Work should not be hostage to a platform
Platforms close, change terms, or quietly bury what they used to promote. Anything that only exists on somebody else's service is on loan. The site is the copy you control, which is the only reason it needs to exist at all.
Releases and shows need their own shape
A record, a screening, a show and an exhibition do not share a structure, and a template that flattens them into blog posts loses what makes each one legible. How work goes out should be designed alongside the work itself.
Video and audio have to be handled properly
The fastest way to make good work look bad is bad compression. Encoding, delivery and how the thing behaves on a phone with poor signal are engineering decisions that directly affect how the work reads.
The design should come from the work
A portfolio that looks like every other portfolio does the opposite of its job. Where the visual language is taken from the practice rather than a theme, the site stops being packaging and starts being part of the output.
Someone has to be able to update it
A site only the developer can change is one that stops being current the moment the invoice is paid. Whatever the arrangement, the artist has to be able to add work without asking permission.
In short
Almost none of this is about aesthetics, which is usually the only part that gets discussed. It is about whether the thing is still yours, still current and still legible in five years.
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Questions worth asking before you commission a website
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