NZ In Pictures — Designing a Website Where the Photography Does the Talking
NZ In Pictures (nzinpictures.co.nz) is the online home of David Kerr’s landscape photography — a collection of images capturing New Zealand’s most striking scenery, available as prints and stocked through retailers across the country.
David came to us needing a website that could do a few things at once: showcase his work in a way that did it justice, sell prints directly, and help stockists and customers find each other. Simple enough on the surface — but photography websites have a particular challenge that a lot of agencies underestimate.
The photography is the product. The website’s job is to get out of the way.
The Design Challenge
Most websites are designed to communicate. They use text, layout, colour, and imagery together to tell a story and guide a visitor toward an action. Photography websites are different. The images need space — real space — to land. A cluttered layout, a competing colour palette, or a fussy navigation structure will undermine even the strongest photography.
For NZ In Pictures, we kept the design deliberately restrained. A clean, light layout with generous whitespace. Neutral backgrounds that don’t compete with the colours in David’s images. Typography that’s present but unobtrusive — there to support, not to draw attention to itself.
The homepage puts the photography front and centre immediately. No hero text block, no splash screen, no pop-ups. The first thing you see is the work.
Showcasing the Work
Landscape photography at this quality deserves to be seen large. We designed the gallery and product pages to display images at the largest practical size — letting the detail, colour, and composition come through before a visitor has read a single word.
Product pages were built to answer the questions a print buyer actually has: how large does this print come, what does it look like in a room, what are the paper and printing options. The goal was to give customers enough information to feel confident buying without having to contact David first.
The Stockists Page
One of the more involved pieces of the build was the stockists directory. NZ In Pictures prints are stocked through retailers across New Zealand — over 100 stockists across 15 regions. Customers looking for a local retailer needed a way to find them quickly, and David needed a way to manage that list without it becoming a maintenance burden.
We built a region-filtered stockist directory — customers can browse by region to find their nearest stockist, with contact details and location information for each. The structure was built to be easy for David to update as stockists are added or removed, without needing developer involvement for routine changes.
The Outcome
The result is a site that works the way a photography business needs it to — quietly and confidently. David’s images are the first thing visitors see and the last thing they remember. The commerce layer is there when needed but never intrusive. And customers and stockists can find what they’re looking for without friction.
For us, this project was a good reminder that good web design isn’t always about doing more. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a client is create the conditions for their work to speak for itself.
Selling creative work online and want a website that reflects the quality of what you do? Get in touch — we’d love to help.
