Richele Young is an art director and designer working with beauty, skincare, and lifestyle brands. Elevio Solutions handled both the design and the development of her portfolio site: a fully custom WordPress theme, written in PHP and SCSS for her work and nothing else.
The Challenge
An art director’s portfolio is judged by the same eye that made the work in it. The visitors who matter, brand leads and creative directors deciding who to hire, form an opinion about the site before they finish the first scroll. So the build had to hold a standard set by campaign photography, and then get out of its way.
The work itself set the harder constraint. These are campaigns built on texture, soft focus, and restraint. Imagery that carries that much of the message needs room to breathe and needs to arrive sharp, which pulls the design toward large, uncompressed art and pulls performance in the opposite direction. Reconciling those two is the whole job.
What We Built
A custom theme designed around a single idea: the layout is a frame, not a feature. Type is set in one confident display face against generous white space, so the pages stay quiet and the campaign work supplies all the colour. Project pages open on full-bleed art and let each piece run at the scale it was shot for.
The structure follows how the work is actually commissioned. Individual launches and campaigns are their own case studies, a services section states the scope she takes on (art direction, branding, digital development, production), and testimonials sit near the point where a visitor is deciding whether to make contact.
Technical Implementation
The theme is hand-written PHP with an SCSS build and vanilla JavaScript on the front end. Fonts are self-hosted as woff2 and preloaded rather than pulled from a third-party CDN, which keeps typography rendering immediately and keeps visitor data out of someone else’s logs.
Image delivery is where a photography portfolio is won or lost. Art is served through a responsive pipeline with lazy loading below the fold, so a phone on mobile data is never made to download a print-scale file to fill a small frame. Compression is tuned per image with the quality kept high, because on this site the photography is the product.
| Project | Detail |
|---|---|
| Client | Richele Young, art director and designer |
| Role | Design & Development |
| Platform | WordPress, fully custom theme |
| Stack | PHP, SCSS, vanilla JavaScript |
| Content model | Four campaign case studies, a services section, and testimonials |
The Outcome
The site presents a body of beauty and skincare campaign work at the scale it deserves, on a build light enough to open quickly on a phone. Design and development came from one team, so there was no hand-off between the person shaping the layout and the person writing the markup.
This is the same approach we bring to every WordPress build: themes written for the site they serve, and small payloads. See the rest of our work in the portfolio, or get in touch if the craft itself is the pitch. We reply within 24 hours.