Aperture, a print quarterly rebuilt for the web.

Aperture is a 120-year-old quarterly that helped define the canon of photography. Their existing website was, to put it gently, a museum of WordPress plugins. Images were cropped square, headlines were sentence case, captions were optional. The archive — the actual value of the institution — was buried three clicks deep behind a "Learn More" button.

The redesign started from a single premise: the site should read the way the magazine reads. That meant serifs, wide margins, captions that said who made the photo and when, and a rhythm that slows you down. It also meant a CMS the editors actually wanted to use, not a Frankenstein of ACF and fear.

I wrote the first prototype in three weeks, directly in Next.js, skipping the usual Figma middle layer. Working in code surfaced the real constraints early — image ratios, colour management, print-to-screen contrast — and let the editorial team click around a live prototype instead of reading a spec.

"The best Aperture has ever looked on a screen." — THE NEW YORK TIMES

The final site has three surfaces: a homepage that reads like a magazine cover; an issue view that paces 40 pages of photography with captions that don't apologise for being long; and an archive that goes all the way back to 1905, with a search that respects the reader's time.