KarenLuk.net, an illustration gallery in WordPress

Karen Luk is a fantastic illustrator on the West Coast who sometimes dabbles in comics. She asked me to design a site for her with a CMS that would help her organize her artwork and post the occasional press release or convention appearance announcement. But under no circumstances could the site look like it had a CMS sticking out of its backside. She wanted a look that was minimal, clean, modern, sophisticated. She wanted prospective clients to see her artwork and her heritage, not another Wordpress blog. And she needed it all done in time for a looming convention!

A screenshot of Karen Luk's WordPress-based illustration gallery site.

We decided to use with WordPress as a backend solution, because Karen was already familiar with its controls, veteran blogger that she is. The artwork and comics pages would be handled by Alex Rabe’s NextGEN Gallery Plugin. The front page would need a custom template while the blog posts were renamed “announcements” and scooted off to the News section. And as always, I optimized the code for accessibility, both human and search engine. The design lent itself to clean, semantic markup.

I snapped the site together, and it was up and running in time for her to pass out business cards with its URL at the convention.

All in all, this was a fun little project, and it was great to have the chance to help out a fellow illustrator under the burden of a looming deadline. I frequently visit her site to see what she’s uploaded. Now go check out her work!