A portfolio that gets out of the way

Craft is judged by the eye, in about two seconds, and then the viewer decides whether to spend longer. A tile is a surface, a glaze, a depth of colour and a hand — none of which survive a small image in a busy layout.

The atelier also has two audiences who look for different things. An architect or a contractor wants to know the scale of work already delivered and whether the atelier can hold a schedule. A private client wants to fall in love with a pattern. A single portfolio has to serve both without patronising either.

Design the frame, not the picture. The interface holds still — restrained type, generous margin, no decorative gesture competing with a decorative product — so that the colour on the page belongs to the tile and not to us.

The brand gave us the discipline for it. 1.618 is the golden ratio; an atelier named after a proportion should not be presented in a layout that ignores proportion. Spacing and image sizing follow that logic rather than a grid picked at random.

And the portfolio is filterable rather than chronological, because "show me work like mine" is the question people actually arrive with.

Website and portfolio architecture. Project pages as the centre of gravity, with a filterable index over them — Selçuklu, Lale, Kübik, Uyanış and the named architectural commissions each stand as their own piece rather than as a row in a gallery.

A dedicated Handmade Tiles route separate from the project index, for the visitor who has arrived to understand the product rather than to browse the work.

References, kept plain. When the list includes the Grand Çamlıca Mosque, embellishment subtracts.

Content and social design. Photography direction and the layouts the atelier posts with, so a tile shot on Instagram and the same tile on the site read as one body of work.

The site is live and is how the atelier is seen by architects, contractors and private clients. Commercial results are the client's to share.

What we will claim is the restraint. A decorative product does not need a decorative website, and the hardest part of a job like this is deciding what not to design.