Internationally acclaimed artist Grace Siregar had never had a website before, and needed an online presence to represent her diverse portfolio including painting, sculpture, installations, video and performance art. Hailing from the Batak homelands of North Sumatra, Grace's themes include the environment, climate change, family, cultural identity and war and reconciliation.

This project involved several meetings with Grace to design the site around her audience and her art. In setting a brief, I found it useful to establish keywords that would guide all the decisions throughout the site; in Grace's words these were 'contemporary, simple, powerful (a little bite of chilli!) and unique'.

Grace mentioned red, white and black are Batak colours, so we balanced these to portray Grace's cultural background which forms an important element of her art. Teal, yellow and occasional green were incorporated to balance out the red.

Typefaces used are New June Serif by Hubert Jocham for the masthead — it's quite playful but also has a bit of attitude, along with some unconventional shapes to respond to the requirement of "unique" and "spontaneous". It's also stylish enough to work without needing a logo, which could have drawn attention away from Grace's art. This was paired with Pluto by Hannes von Döhren, and its tone is also a little playful, with some interesting touches like the rounded diagonals.

Visit the website at www.gracesiregar.com (still under construction in places, and with Indonesian language coming soon!) With coding by Krzysztof Szafranek and design (and some photography) by me.