Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé is an academic, artist, composer, and improviser based in London, working with the materiality and musicality of language.
We created Emmanuelle’s visual identity and designed and developed a WordPress website that feels clean and spacious, with just enough hand-drawn texture to match the work. The result is a flexible portfolio site that makes it easy to share projects, writing, and documentation without losing the feeling of the studio.
Project Team
UX/UI Design: Katie Gee
Branding and UI Design: Cecilia Righini
Development: Nata Sheketa
Awards
Awwwards: Honorable Mention
The Challenge
Emmanuelle needed a site that aligns closely with the work: calm, clear, and considered, but never sterile. The design had to make room for imagery and language to breathe, while still feeling characterful and personal.
The platform also needed to be practical. Emmanuelle’s work spans years and media types, so the site needed to make it easy to find work from different periods and formats, without turning browsing into a slog. And it needed to stay simple across devices, so people can explore on mobile just as easily.
Finally, we wanted the experience to feel welcoming for different viewers, including through colour and contrast choices, without turning accessibility into a “special feature” separate from the identity.
What We Did
We built a classic, clean visual identity with organic accents. Hand-drawn lines and scribbles show up throughout the site, including a cursor that shifts from a hand-drawn arrow into a scribble when visitors hover over links.
We also designed the structure to support archive-style browsing, so visitors can quickly jump between years and different kinds of work without losing their place. These small interactions echo Emmanuelle’s clean-but-organic aesthetic and make the experience feel tactile.
We chose Ygro Sans for its characterful simplicity: a straightforward base with playful cutaway details that stay readable across contexts.
To give visitors some choice in how they experience the work, we created two colour palettes that can be toggled at any time: one in green tones, and one in organic tertiary tones.
The site was built from scratch on WordPress, with a modular layout for single work pages so the system can grow over time. On mobile, we adjusted navigation to a hamburger menu with a full-page layout, keeping browsing simple and comfortable on smaller screens.
Impact
Emmanuelle now has a digital home that feels aligned with the work, without getting in the way of it. Clean structure and modular pages make it easier to keep the portfolio current, while hand-drawn details add warmth and texture.
Palette switching gives viewers more control over how they browse, and the responsive build keeps navigation clear across devices.
