SKAGGS Blog

SKAGGS is proud to announce the launch of visual artist Rodney Durso’s new portfolio site. Rodney is a Chelsea-based visual artist and a fixture of the New York art and music scene.

He wanted a design that wasn’t the traditional stagnant portfolio site: the usual flip-through format didn’t suit his varied forms of expression and he wanted something more dynamic. We were tasked with programming a website that is as visually interesting and inviting as Rodney’s artwork.

“One important aspect of the site was that Rodney needed to be able to maintain his pieces himself and easily add to his collection. Over the course of his career he’s produced a huge diverse range of artworks. The site showcases everything from print works such as Mega-Something to found-object photography series like Bicycle Salad.”

— Nicole Confrey, Web Developer

“The website had to do one thing well, it had to show all of my work and projects in the same voice and with the same importance, showing all of my creative output as equally relevant and I believe we accomplished this thanks to the team at SKAGGS”

—Rodney Durso, Artist

Some of Rodney’s works presented us with unique layout challenges because in addition to his paintings Rodney has many three-dimensional pieces. He uses a lot of color in his artwork and we chose a neutral palette to make sure that the website didn’t overpower any of the artwork. From a technical point of view we were careful not to use Flash on the site since it isn’t search engine friendly. Instead, Javascripting takes care of all of the informational rollovers making the site compatible across most major browsers. It is also the top listing on Google’s search engine.

“Too many artists’ sites get bogged down with large Flash files. This can mean that sites are hard to search for, and sometimes don’t load if the user doesn’t have the latest version of Flash installed. In order to showcase Rodney’s fantastic range of work correctly we engineered the site using HTML and Javascript.”

— Robbie Edwards, Web Developer

Check out Rodney’s portfolio.