Susan Street Fine Art has been a fixture on Cedros Avenue in Solana Beach for decades. It’s a gallery built on something the internet doesn’t replace: relationships, provenance, and a curatorial eye. Although Susan Street is now open by appointment only and no longer runs gallery shows, collectors still come to the location to browse works of art for custom installations, both residential and commercial.

That’s a wonderful thing to build a website around, and it was the starting point for everything I did here.

This project was really about a simple, exciting question: how do we let the art lead? When a gallery represents this much beautiful work and this many talented artists, the website’s job is to get out of the way and let the work do what it already does so well in the room, which is draw you in.

I built a proof-of-concept redesign at ssfa-redesign-poc.pages.dev to show what an art-first, artist-first experience could look like. Same business model, same beautiful catalog, just with the work front and center and a fast, modern feel to match.

One of the great assets of working in technology now is that I can spin up a real working prototype for clients relatively easily, and get much more detailed feedback on the flow, the architecture, and the look and feel.

Starting from the strengths

Susan Street’s real assets are exactly the things worth celebrating on a website:

  • The artists. A curated program of painters and makers, each with a story worth telling.
  • The work. A deep catalog of pieces that deserve to be seen large, loaded fast, and shown beautifully.
  • The projects. Custom installations and a consulting practice that helps collectors build collections they love.
  • The place. A real gallery on Cedros, with a point of view and a community around it.

The redesign is really just a way of pointing all of that at the visitor more directly: put the artists forward, give each work room to breathe, and make it easy to take the next step, whether that’s to inquire, follow an artist, or plan a visit.

After my initial POC, I’ll be refining the concept from conversations with the client, making more effective changes to the home page and building out the individual screens for projects, artists, and more.

“Now on View” will get new language soon, but it stays above the fold. We want the website to reflect how dynamic the artists’ work is, and to feel alive and current the moment someone arrives.

Artists are very much the spine of the site. Each artist gets a clear, dignified space, so the program becomes something you can explore, not just a list of names.

Artwork detail pages will carry the medium, dimensions, and a clear path to inquire, so a piece you love is one tap from a conversation.

The site will also be mobile-driven, built for browsing on a phone, not just a banner to pinch and zoom.

Inspiration worth borrowing

We spent a lot of time looking at galleries that do this beautifully. Gagosian, David Zwirner, and Pace all share the same instinct: a kind of visual restraint that lets the work lead. Exhibition-led homepages, editorial depth, location as part of the story, and inquiry instead of checkout.

We also did a pass over Southern California galleries. Closer to home, Madison Gallery runs a lovely exhibition reel, and Quint Gallery shows that a small, focused program can feel serious. There’s so much good practice to draw on, and all of it points the same direction: let the art do the talking.

The platform was never the problem

We did consider moving the site off the current CMS. After some research I decided it wouldn’t add much value. I also learned a thing or two about art websites along the way, mainly that most of them run on a similar technology stack, so in the end we didn’t need to leave the current CMS, Artlogic, at all. The same content delivery network that already serves the gallery’s images can serve modern, right-sized WebP versions, the kind of optimization that’s standard practice now. Combined with lazy-loading and a cleaner layout, the work loads quickly and looks sharp.

To show what that feels like, I pulled Susan Street’s actual project and artwork images, converted them to right-sized WebP, and built three demo pages: Home, Artists, and Projects.

The result: the entire image set across all three pages came to about 1.0 MB total. That’s roughly 13 times lighter than a single heavy project page today, and it looks just as rich. Same art. Same beauty. Just a faster, more modern stage for it.

My next steps are to keep refining and iterating quickly, capturing feedback from real builds with the client. This part is a genuine game changer. We don’t just look at the site, we actually use it, and then change it based on how the client feels.