HARUKO ICHIKAWA WEBSITE DESIGN

Haruko Ichikawa is an artist and author I greatly admire, so I designed a website for her, using Figma to make mock-ups for desktop and mobile. Here’s a link to the Figma project. This is a personal project and not official.

I began by considering who Ichikawa is as an artist: first and foremost, she is most well-known for her manga, and her most famous series is Houseki no Kuni (Land of the Lustrous). I decided to keep the focus on her manga by making the website mainly black and white. It was also important that there should be a page to feature her manga, which I thought would be fun to design as if it were a bookshelf with physical volumes sitting on it. I then looked at various black and white websites for inspiration, and I found a number of experimental, interactive features that I wanted to incorporate, such as a parallax effect, hover to reveal, and music that I took from the animated version of Ichikawa’s series.

Throughout all this, I also wanted to conserve the identity of Ichikawa’s art, so I came up with a few keywords—mysterious, moody, slightly unsettling, and striking—that I referred to while creating the visual style of the website.

With the research done, I knew what pages I wanted the website to include, so I created a flowchart to decide how the user experience would play out. I kept the site simple and put some focus on the interactivity, so I sketched out storyboards for these as well. I then created wireframes of these pages.

Desktop wireframes

Mobile wireframes

Finally, I brought the wireframes to high fidelity using Ichikawa’s artwork, some of which I edited for interactivity (such as cutting a panel into layers to achieve the parallax effect). At this step, I added the interactive elements from my storyboard. I also chose the typography to match her art visually.

Homepage (desktop)