The Client
Midori is a multidisciplinary artist, Tokyo native and long-time resident of San Francisco. She travels nationally and internationally with her work, which includes performance, installation and visual art. Her work often incorporates natural materials such as plants and flowers, as well as aspects of shibari, Japanese rope work. Her productions include a commission by San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to create an interactive party-as-performance-art as the opening night gala for a Japanese art exhibition.
The Challenge
Midori needed a logo to represent her sophisticated artwork brand. She also needed a responsive WordPress website to showcase her art and provide information and context for prospective galleries, buyers and the general public. She needed to display both still photos and video on the site, with many interlinked pages.
The Solution
For the logo, I used a contrast of typefaces to reference the visual and emotional tension of Midori’s work. The “Midori” type—letterspaced and extended, in lively, active red—creates an elegant hierarchy with the more subdued gray, condensed tagline. “Midori” comes forward towards the viewer, while the tagline doesn’t need to shout, and recedes.
Working with Midori to format the structure of the website, I created a clean, simple look so that the focus is on her work. I customized a bare-bones WordPress theme to create a rich, content-heavy site, writing some CSS and HTML code. I also sourced and managed a developer to create custom features such as page-specific header images and a floating menu bar.
The Impact
In the first nine months after the website launch, Midori was contacted by 35% more buyers and event coordinators year-over-year.
The home page featured a slide show of selected performance, installation and visual art.
Midori’s Performance and Artwork, “Evoco”
- Paint is smeared on the model, bound with rope and decorated with vegetation.
- Soft paper is pressed against the model’s skin, picking up impressions of the paint.
- Midori adds gold paint and gold leaf.
- The paper is mounted to pale cream brocade, which in turn is mounted to different colors of scroll. Click images to enlarge.
