In collaboration with Monsoon Design, who led the brand identity and visual system, I designed and developed the custom WordPress website for Jay Pearson, a Santa Fe artist whose work moves across sculpture, photography, and political-historical reference. The site’s job is simple to state and easy to get wrong: get out of the way of the work. Pearson’s pieces carry their own weight, and a website that competes with them — through navigation flourishes, layout tricks, or design personality — undermines the very thing it is supposed to present.
The challenge was to build a site that felt considered without ever feeling decorated. An artist site has a small number of jobs — show the work, identify the artist, make contact possible — but the discipline is in how restrained the design has to be to do those jobs without pulling focus. Pearson’s catalog also keeps growing, so the structure had to support an open-ended archive without forcing a manual layout decision every time a new piece was added.
I built a custom WordPress theme tailored to Monsoon Design’s visual system, with a custom post type for the archived works at the center of the architecture. Each piece is its own entry with its own image and bracketed descriptive title — the format Pearson uses to label the work — and the homepage and archive views pull from the same source automatically. Adding a new piece means uploading an image, writing a title, and publishing. No template fiddling, no layout decisions, no risk of the design drifting over time as the catalog grows.
The visible site is deliberately quiet. A grid of works on the homepage, a single-work view that lets the image take the page, a short About page, a direct contact path. Typography, generous spacing, and image cropping carry the design weight; nothing else needs to. The result reads as one continuous piece of editorial restraint rather than a website happening around the art.
The partnership with Monsoon Design followed the pattern I prefer for artist and gallery engagements: a clean handoff at the visual system, then a development build that honors the design instead of compromising it, and a finished product that looks like one studio made it. The site is a working tool the artist can run himself, and a credible front door for a body of work that deserves both.
