Angie Huang Photo

About the Client

If you’ve ever seen photos of Winyl Club, AYI’s dinner parties, A Timeless Day's events, or Bica’s BYOB dinners… you’ve probably seen Angie Huang’s work. Angie has this incredible eye for capturing subjects in their natural states. Her photos are journalistic and authentic, curated and cozy, emotional and illustrative. They always tell a story.

I got to work with Angie on refreshing her website as she ramps up her photography efforts. The process was such a reflective, visually delicious journey filled with stunning photos and inspiring brainstorm sessions filled with ideas of how to rethink the way we can build a portfolio site.

The Vision

When reimagining Angie’s website, we had a few goals in mind:

Organize her rich collection of photos into categories that could be browsed and added to easily
Highlight the storytelling quality of her photos that makes her photographic style special
Increase visibility on collaborations she’s done with popular local makers, restaurants, and small businesses
Create layouts for pages that Angie could easily build and send out for proposals for more editorial opportunities

We wanted to create an experience that would make visitors feel like they were peering into a traveler’s journal — a cozy and immersive collection of snippets of written anecdotes, highlights on unique and intimate optical perspectives, and clusters of visually delicious vignettes.

The Game Plan

To start, we browsed her amazing collection of photos to develop an information architecture of photo categories she could easily follow as she adds albums from new shoots to her site.

After taking inventory of Angie’s vast range of photos, we landed on a few top categories that her albums could be sorted into:

love&portraits, for the photos that celebrate human connection, both social and with the self

events, for the photos that capture big and little moments at memorable gatherings, from winyl club to cookbook launches

lifestyle, for the photos that capture the brand feels and products

stories&travels, for the photos driven by curiosity about the world and the people who live in it

We migrated her Wordpress site to Squarespace, giving her access to a robust collection of modules she can use to build captivating pages for each photoshoot. This allows Angie to scale her website content while also adding fun customizations per album as she needs to.

The Final Product

The final product incorporated a blend of masonry-style grids, content modules with layered imagery, and sprinkles of Angie’s personal branding.

Since Angie’s last name can be translated to “yellow” in Mandarin, we paid homage to her name by sprinkling in yellow accents throughout the site, such as in the background of the global footer. With Angie’s photography being so organic, natural, and authentic, we added a bit of that organic feel with some “blobbage” to her original logo, which was originally a perfectly round yellow circle. That “blobby circle” became a motif that we layered on select images to add a bit of personalization to the overall feel of the site.

In addition to her portfolio selections, Angie writes thoughtful reflections for some of her photo sessions on her Substack, Candidly Angie. To promote cross-visibility across platforms, we sprinkled in CTAs to relevant Substack posts throughout her collection pages. These CTAs are fun surprises to uncover throughout the site that tie together Angie’s written stories with the visual stories that her photos tell.

I can’t thank Angie enough for allowing me to reimagine her photo categories, being open to letting me try new things & pivot as new ideas came up, being so thorough with answering my many questions, and just letting me get to swoon over her gorgeous collection of photos.