Katija Kovačić

A website for Katija Kovačić, a painter and conservator-restorer in Dubrovnik: her originals, prints, painted editions and sculpture, coloured by the paintings themselves and edited through Decap CMS.

We designed and built the site as a gallery and a catalogue in one. Every work is listed with its availability and price, and an enquiry opens an email to Katija with the title of the work already filled in.

Colour from the paintings

The palette is sampled from the paintings themselves: red, cobalt, ochre, pink, teal and green on warm paper, set in Fraunces and Instrument Sans. Each work also brings its own colours. When the site is built, every photograph is read for an accent colour and five swatches, and these colour the tape and frame around the work, the tint its card takes on when you hover over it, and the enquiry button on its page. The home page opens on a studio wall of three works chosen for their contrasting colours.

The Works page: a row of colour dots, one for each painting, above availability and type filters and a grid of paintings, each pinned with a strip of tape in its own colour.

A catalogue that filters as you click

The works page lists every piece with its status, medium, size, year and price. Chips filter by availability and by type, a medium menu and a sort order narrow the list further, and the count updates as you go. Along the top, a row of dots, one per work in its own colour, leads straight to each painting.

Collections as a colour system

Every collection has a colour of its own: originals red, prints blue, painted editions pink, sculpture ochre. The same dots mark the menu, the footer, the filters and the collection tiles, and availability has its own set, so a dot always stands for a work's colour, a collection or a status.

The Collections page: tiles for Originals, Prints, Painted Editions and Sculptures, each with a coloured dot and a photo frame in the same colour.

Every work shown whole

An artwork page leads with the painting uncropped, at its own proportions. Beside it are the medium, size, year, collection, price and a row of the colours in the work, followed by the next work and more from the same collection. Installation photographs show the pieces at scale in real rooms.

The Red Bus Life page: the painting in a red frame beside a card with its availability, medium, size, year, five colour swatches, price and a red

A full CMS, no hosting fees

Works, prices, availability and collections are kept as Markdown in the site's Git repository and edited through Decap CMS, so the studio can add a painting or mark one sold without touching code. Photographs are turned into sized AVIF and WebP versions when the site builds. The site itself is static, with no database or server behind it, so there are no hosting fees: Netlify serves it as it is.