Work/Case study 04
In development
写真 · 観察の記録
Bon Hatfield
Photography
Melbourne · 35mm film · personal portfolio
A photography portfolio built as a zine rather than a gallery — and one of the first sites Achi ever made. Still being developed, deliberately still on the shelf.
Photographer
Bon HatfieldScope
Design & build — Collections, Prints, ContactPlace in the studio
One of Achi's earliest projects — ongoingStatus
In development · not yet publicThe question
How do you design a photography portfolio without designing over the photography?
The default answer is a white page and a uniform grid — get out of the way entirely. It's safe, and it makes every photographer look like every other photographer. Bon's work is observational: Melbourne shopfronts, a car in afternoon light, his kid in a knitted hat. Flattened into equal squares, it reads as stock.
So the site became an editorial framework instead. It sequences, paces and frames the photographs — giving them context and rhythm — without putting a single graphic flourish on top of them.
Prints, not thumbnails
Every image carries a white border and sits at a slight angle, scattered rather than aligned — photographs spread across a table to be sorted, mid-edit.
Scale as punctuation
One photograph holds the centre at full size; the rest crowd the margins small. Loud, quiet, loud — the layout does what a zine spread does.
Nav in the margin
Three words stacked top-left in tracked-out uppercase. No bar, no logo block, no hamburger — a contents list on the inside cover.
Palette
Two neutrals, and
whatever the film gave us
The interface owns almost no colour — paper, ink, print white. Every other value on the page arrives inside a photograph, which is why the palette below is sampled from Bon's frames rather than chosen for him.
Page ground. Warm off-white, so print borders read as white and photographs don’t glow.
All type and every hairline rule. Near-black rather than pure, to sit with warm paper.
From the terrace and roller doors. The only accent — status dots, rules, hover states.
The pink apartment block at dusk. Reserved for large quiet fields between dense sections.
The green cast 35mm leaves in foliage and shadow. Used on collection dividers.
Captions, metadata and Japanese annotations — present but never competing with a frame.
Typography
Type as caption
and as masthead
Two registers only. A condensed uppercase masthead for the name, and wide-tracked uppercase for everything functional — nav, labels, captions. Nothing decorative, nothing italic.
Masthead — condensed uppercase grotesque
Two lines, centred, 0.95 leading · used once per pagePhotographyABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
Navigation & labels
CollectionsPrints
ContactStacked, left-aligned, 7px tracking. Wide enough that three words occupy a column of their own — the margin becomes part of the composition instead of dead space.
Captions & annotations
Fitzroy, 2024 · Portra 400図 04 · 観察の記録Monospace for place, year and stock; a Japanese line where a caption would sit in a Japanese photo book. Both set in graphite so they annotate rather than announce.余白 · The quiet part
Empty space is a layout decision, not leftover room.
Between each dense cluster of prints the site goes almost entirely blank. In a zine that's the turn of a page — the pause that lets the next image land. It's the hardest thing to defend in a portfolio, because it looks like nothing is there.Where this sits in the studio
One of the first, and still open on the desk.
This was one of the earliest websites Achi designed, and it's kept in the portfolio for that reason rather than in spite of it. It's where the studio first tried letting a client's work decide the structure of a site — asymmetry, editorial sequencing, Japanese references, no template.
Some of it would be built differently now. That's the useful part: it's a record of a way of working forming, and it's still being refined with Bon rather than signed off and archived.
Got work that deserves its own structure?
achiwebdesign@gmail.com · 0423 626 037