Öykü

Bringing the exhibition aesthetic online

Artist portfolio sites tend to swing between two extremes: too corporate and cold, or too decorative and noisy. What Öykü needed was neither — the work should sit at the centre, the site should recede behind it. Gallery wall aesthetic but on screen: each piece has room to breathe, navigation doesn't compete for attention.

Static first, no unnecessary complexity

After the first call it was clear: content changes infrequently and the artist is non-technical. A CMS-backed structure would add complexity she didn't need and maintenance overhead that would outlast the project. I chose Next.js App Router with static export — content lives in a data file, and every push to Vercel publishes instantly.

Visual quality was critical. Next.js's Image component brings optimised formats and lazy loading out of the box — that matters because large images on portfolio sites are the most common source of speed loss. I didn't add another optimisation layer; the built-in handling was sufficient at this scale.

Typography choices were deliberate: serif heading, generous whitespace, minimal colour palette. Agreed with the artist — silent but solid.

Why Next.js, why static?

A dynamic backend was unnecessary for a portfolio site. Next.js static export generates all pages at build time; Vercel serves them from a global CDN. The result: no extra infrastructure, no maintenance overhead, maximum speed. Tailwind kept design consistency in a small CSS footprint — fast to customise, leaves no unused code behind.

What shipped

A portfolio site live in two weeks and fully in the artist's control. In her words: "The site puts my work first and quietly disappears behind it. That's exactly what I wanted — silent but solid."