Nygel Jones Fine Art
Written byWill Pei YuanNygel Jones is a Boston-based artist who builds and paints shaped wooden panels and frames — he compares the process to composing music, tape measure as sheet music, power tools as instruments. The site documents five works individually, each with its own page, materials and dimensions, tracks upcoming and past events, and takes inquiries through a real contact form rather than a mailto link.
- Role —
- Design and build, end to end. The site itself carries the credit: every page footer reads "Site designed & developed by @iamwill.us."
- Stack —
- Next.js, React, Vercel, Schema.org structured data
The problem
An artist who builds his own shaped panels needs each piece to stand on its own — the materials, the dimensions, the story behind it in his words — along with a place to say where the work can be seen next and a way for collectors and galleries to reach him. The site has to hold all of that for a small body of work without burying it.
What I built
Home, About, Works and Events are the four real sections; Contact sits off the main nav. Home is short — an artist statement, then three teaser cards (Events, Works, About) that link out rather than holding content themselves. The gallery lives at /works, and the individual pieces at /works/rising-dawn, /works/faucet-maze, /works/shape-space, /works/season-ways-your-destination and /works/city-shape-part-1.
The About page is the artist's own account: a BFA from Montserrat College of Art, years in custom fabrication, sign work, picture framing and furniture-making before landing on the current work, and the music-composition comparison repeated from the homepage. /works lists all five pieces with year, medium and a short description in his own words — "Rising Dawn," for instance, is described as depicting "an other-worldly sunrise and sunset happening together." Each piece's own page adds dimensions, weight and materials.
/events lists three dates with a status label each — one "Ongoing" (a two-day show in Somerville with a named floral collaborator), one "Upcoming" (a holiday open studio with an Instagram link instead of a form), and one "Past Event" (a group show at House of Waves). /contact is a real form — Full Name, Email Address, Subject and a Message field — rather than a mailto link.
Decisions worth explaining
The engineering, for anyone who wants it.
Images sized for the screen they land on
/works renders each piece through next/image with a fill layout, a responsive srcset from 384px up to 3840px, loading="lazy" and a hover scale transition. A phone pulls a phone-sized file and a large display gets the detail, and pieces further down the list load only as they come into view.
The homepage is text
Every image on the site lives one click past the homepage. The landing page is an artist statement and three linked teaser cards, so the first thing a visitor meets is how he thinks about the work, and the work itself is one click away at /works.
Pages are static and revalidate on a timer
Responses carry `x-nextjs-prerender: 1` and `x-nextjs-stale-time: 300`, and a repeat request came back `x-vercel-cache: HIT`. The pages are generated ahead of time and served from cache, refreshing on a five-minute window rather than rendering per request.