Michelle Pauly
An architect's portfolio rebuilt for a new stage in her career.
Client challenge
Michelle Pauly is an architectural designer in Los Angeles. Her old portfolio was a static site she had no way of updating herself, so it had sat untouched for years and still showed the career she had when it launched. Everything ran down one very long scrolling page: her professional projects, her graduate work and her undergraduate work, all in a single column.
The page also never said what her role on each project had been, which matters most on the professional work, where the buildings belong to the firms she worked at. A firm looking at her portfolio wants to know what she can do and which parts of the work were hers.
Our strategic approach
The site had to show where she is now, leading with her professional work. The academic and process projects were removed. The professional work stayed and got built out, from the five projects the old site listed to ten across residential and commercial.
We went through current architecture portfolios together before drawing anything and took the structure from them. We added a field for her role on every project, along with the firm, the phases she carried and the scope, and set it in a block beside the main image, so a hiring architect can see what she was responsible for.
She also had to be able to keep the site current herself, without a developer in the loop.
Solution
The homepage is the work itself: a grid of every project under a category filter (All, Residential, Commercial).
The grid is uniform. Every project sits in the same 4:5 portrait crop at the same size, with its name and a type line underneath, always visible. Nothing is held back behind a hover, so the grid reads the same on a laptop and on a phone.
We set the ground as a warm off-white rather than pure white. It keeps the page from glaring around the images, and it reads as a little more elevated while staying clean and bright.
Every project, category and image is a document she edits in Sanity. She got the hang of it immediately and had her most recent work in and published on her own.
