APA Wojciechowski. Architecture takes the lead.

In an architectural portfolio, a building photograph carries information. It communicates scale, surroundings and character in ways that a short description cannot. APA’s website opens with a large image, giving the project itself room to lead.

I was responsible for frontend and backend implementation. The scope combined the technical build with practical everyday use, both when exploring the practice’s projects and when accessing the rest of the website.

The website presents projects with information such as year, location, client, area, status and category. Visitors can move from a visual impression to understanding a building’s scale and purpose.

That gives the catalogue different needs from a simple image gallery. The implementation has to accommodate varied names, sets of information and photographs while keeping the browsing experience coherent.

Alongside completed and ongoing work, the website includes information about the practice, its team, news, APA Green and APA Innovation. These areas introduce the people and ideas behind the buildings.

For a business planning a comparable website, this distinction matters. A catalogue should have room for future projects and fit the company’s other content. Defining the information each entry needs and how it will be maintained is useful work before implementation begins.

On a phone, photography can still lead, but its frame becomes much narrower. The logo, navigation and route into the project catalogue need to coexist with the image.

This is part of what makes a visual website an interesting development task: the relationship between the image and the interface matters as much as displaying the photograph. The mobile screenshot records that relationship in the live layout.