Bluecadet Interactive

Joshua Cogan is an acclaimed and widely published photographer, as well as a long-time Bluecadet collaborator. He's a trained anthropologist with a gift for finding the most tenuous, threatening, or banal situations and producing visual gold.

We set out to create a portfolio site that reflected Joshua’s strong personality. The challenge was making the site’s functionality more than just a basic set of slideshows. Joshua’s work spans many different areas and subjects, none of which are the same but many have overlapping themes and commentary. We knew Joshua wanted to capture those subtle links that make his work cohesive.

We decided to build an intricate, interactive tagging system that allows users to navigate through the photos within main categories like Travel, Photojournalism, and Portraiture. But users can also click through photos by theme, curating those images by their personal interests like Faith, Music, or even Usain Bolt.

Joshua also wanted his photographs to spread, so the site features granular social media integration, allowing visitors to share direct links to images. Viewers can mark their favorite images, which are displayed on an unobtrusive bottom navigation bar and stored, making sharing your favorite images upon return visits simple.

Built in Flash, the site has a robust Drupal backend, making the content fully administrable and allowing Joshua to easily upload new photographs.

The care and attention to detail, not to mention Joshua's photography, have had an impressive effect. A few months after its launch, the site boasts impressive analytics, with users viewing around twelve pages per visit, spending an average of nearly eight minutes on the site each. There's an almost non-existant bounce rate: 98% of visitors got to the site and stayed. That means almost no one entered only to turn around and leave, instead exploring and viewing Joshua's obviously captivating images.

Credits

Designer

Troy LaChance

Producer

Rebecca Sherman

Production Designer

Jason Grandelli