Growing up in Nova Scotia, LA-based fine art photographer Landry Major has a deep appreciation for the legacies that we cultivate when tending to the land. In her series Keepers of the West, she explores the generational struggles of family-owned ranches while celebrating the beauty of this long-forgotten lifestyle. When Landry’s project was selected for an exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography, she reached out to Wonderful Machine to create an emailer that would promote this exciting opportunity and José Silva was ready to take on the design.
When designing emailers, I have in mind that the combination of the photographer’s goals and design best practices is the recipe for a good project. I use the initial meeting to learn more about their brand, understand their needs, and what they want to achieve with the emailer. Just before speaking with Landry, I reviewed her work and fell in love. In our meeting, she explained everything about the Keepers of the West project and her exhibition, which to me felt important to grasp before drafting any templates.
For Landry, this emailer needed to invite recipients to her solo exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography, while setting the tone for the project. She was looking for a minimal design, using a single black-and-white image and a grayscale palette to match. Even though Landry didn’t share any samples, she had a clear vision from the onset and was helpful with explanations during our call to guide the template in the direction she wanted.
The selected image was the starting point of building the emailer. The fine art touch of the Keepers of The West project, Landry’s website, and her directions were crucial to creating the design that she was looking for. Options 1 and 2 both look similar with geometric blocks in different shades of gray in an unbalanced composition. In the first option, the image is centered while the second has part of the image floating on a transparent background. The idea was to have elements that could direct people to the information even with the enhanced image. For the third option, I balanced a grid of geometric shapes with a title, image, and the exhibition’s info. And in the final option, I wanted to provide a minimal concept with almost no graphical elements and simply thin lines with a total focus on the image (which, in the end, was her favorite).
Landry responded:
Hi Jose, thanks for these! Number 4 is perfect. It needs to have the address for The Griffin, which is my bad I forgot to include it in the information I sent you. Could you incorporate it and send me a proof? That was too easy!
Working with Landry was a seamless process, as she knew what she wanted from the onset and we got it on our first attempt. In fact, we didn’t even need a second round of revisions or new concepts, which is usually part of the process. Keeping the design minimal mirrors the tone of Landry’s work, while also ensuring the image is powerful and engaging. Sometimes designs have lots of bells and whistles, but for this project, the old saying “less is more” successfully applies to the final product of this emailer.
I wanted to let you know that Mary Virginia Swanson who is a fine art consultant, just used our email promo as an example of a well-done, beautiful design on her international La Luz workshop.
Need help creating a new Emailer Campaign? Reach out!