Jonathan Grado

I'm excited to announce the complete redesign and launch of my new site,  jonathangrado.com. I don't easily find myself content, but this is the closest I've felt to that sweet, sweet "yes, this is good" feeling.

The site is nominated for top Portfolio Honors, as well as winning the Honorable Mention award from awwwards, which recognizes and spotlights the most creative and innovative in web design. It has also been featured on SiteInspire, codrops, Admire the Web, Muzli, @iamcollaps design feed, and more.

In May I decided I needed to refocus the purpose of my photogrpahy site. What started as thinking I would just redesign the homepage turned into a complete overhaul and rebuild from the ground up on a whole new platform. I couldn't do this alone though. I worked with designer Gaétan Pautler of Concrete Club and developer Mäel Ruffini of También, both of which were extremely kind and creative.

Halfway through the project we realized (I was convinced) we needed to switch platforms to something that would give us more freedom. So this is now a photography site built with WebFlow. There are two main thought processes that run through the site. One is that the layout and the size of the photographs make you feel like you're viewing them as large print in a gallery, and two is a cinematic thread that ties together each page as well as the UI/UX. Some of my favorite highlights: the homepage and about page both have overlapping slides to add some dynamics to the scroll; the titles of the pages appear and fade like the title in the beginning of a movie; the about page changes the design of my name on reload; the photo series pages have a VIEW INDEX button to see an overview and the page at a glance.

It was a pleasure working with Gaétan and Mäel, and I couldn't be happier with this redesigned site. I'm so happy with it I guess I don't need to end this with any jokes. Interesting.