Mary Panzer is an expert photo historian, with oodles of beautiful images from early American photographers. She writes and lectures on photography, and it was a thrill to sort out how to get everything included on the site with multiple ports of access. A valuable lesson here was learning to be patient as we experimented with ways to access all the content; we eventually settled on a system where books, articles, and interviews could be quickly found through the menu, image links, searching, or cross-referencing. As for design, much of the heavy lifting was done by Mathew Brady, Lewis Hine, and Henry Clay Anderson (photographers featured on the site).

Another concern in Mary Panzer’s site was finding the right typeface to legibly, yet decoratively, display the important texts which accompany each book and photo. Typography is consistently a concern at Miniboom, especially given the special psychology behind legibility, kerning, and line height. It’s a process.

For this site, we needed only minimal social networking (Facebook, Twitter, an RSS feed), since we wanted to keep the focus on the scholarly work in the site, which would not be updated quite as much as other kinds of sites.

Steven Zezza is a Paris-based professional photographer specializing in wedding, actor and fashion photography. Mr. Zezza needed a site that would showcase his work front and center. Low on text and big on vision, Miniboom created a design that would allow for slideshow functions as well as multiple single photo features. A simple and unique portfolio, in this case has one Mr. Zezza work in several well-known Paris based magazines and one set of photos of a Paris radio station.

Mr. Zezza’s site is a modified WordPress theme, allowing for the photographer to update his/her portfolio as that new gig may be just around the corner, it is important to have control over one’s public artistic presentation. The minimalist design let’s the photos speak for themselves. The site also uses no Flash, allowing it to be viewed on all smart devices including iPhones. It’s in cases like these that it pays to work with Miniboom where we always take Web standards seriously.

Mr. Zezza contacted Miniboom to make a good portfolio site. After intitial consultations, work from the ground to the World Wide Web took about two weeks with revisions and editing. Even after the initial set-up of the site, Miniboom continues to work with Mr. Zezza, helping him create the Web-based face to express his sense of style and flair.