Overview
British photographic artist Mark Vessey is best known for exploring and celebrating icons of pop culture. His work focuses on curated collections of magazines, books and vinyl records that hold cultural significance in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The website needed to reflect the bold, visual nature of his art, with a strong emphasis on animation and image quality.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was ensuring images were small, fast-loading and still visually striking. To achieve this, I built a custom server-side image minification tool with ImageMagick to convert and optimise images into WebP. At the time there was no plugin capable of this, though it was later replaced by a standard WordPress plugin. In hindsight, this could have been developed as a plugin itself.
Animations were also a major focus: GSAP was used in combination with Intersection Observer for dynamic effects, alongside standard CSS keyframe animations to create smooth, engaging transitions throughout the site.
CMS
The site runs on WordPress with Bedrock as the backend. Bedrock provided a more structured foundation with dependency management and environment control. Deployment and maintenance were supported by custom scripts to streamline updates.
Frontend
The frontend was built with PHP, HTML, SCSS and JavaScript (before the move to TypeScript in later projects). A strong emphasis was placed on visual effects and animation performance to showcase Mark’s highly graphical work.
Visit
Mark Vessey