I am a food and travel illustrator and fine artist, who works with digital and analogue mediums like ink, watercolors, gouache, and oil and acrylic paints.
A year or so ago, I wanted to create a new self-hosted website on WordPress to share my illustration and fine art portfolios, as well as my illustration blog. But having had previous websites that were a true headache (because of all of the CSS code I needed to add to make them look good), I decided to do some deep-dive research to see what’s out there.
I discovered Brainstorm Force’s YouTube channel along with step-by-step tutorials from other channels that helped me understand how Spectra worked. I liked that it was a page builder that could help me extend the functionality of my full-site-editing theme, Spectra One, also by Brainstorm Force.
The first feature that made me decide to go for Spectra is its library of pre-built website and page designs. To be specific, its “Kits” under the plugin’s “Design Library.”
The Kits have free and paid ready-to-install pages to create a home page, blog page, contact page, you name it. This helped me start from well-designed pages that I then tweaked to reflect my site’s branding and color scheme.
This means you don’t need to tie yourself down to one theme like we used to in the old days before the introduction of WordPress Gutenberg. With one plugin you can switch between as many designs as you want, with endless possibilities and styles – from minimalist to corporate.
And as a privacy advocate, I find that Spectra being GDPR-compliant is an added-value, as it allows you to download Google fonts locally, a requirement by EU privacy laws.
Design Inspiration and Features Used: For my website, I love clean and minimalist design with muted colors and white spaces, so as not to distract from the actual artwork. With Spectra, I’m able to choose any color or font to customize the different blocks on my website, even beyond the preferences it pulls from the main theme.
Also, Spectra offers a crazy amount of blocks/extensions to help build the different facets of my website.
There’s the Image Gallery block that gives you the option to display your artwork however you want, in any number of columns, and in all sorts of layouts (including grid and responsive masonry). This is great for illustrators wishing to build a simple portfolio website with all of their client commissions in one place.
As a creative, I particularly love the Post Grid block. It gives me the ability to create any number of portfolios – using a page, rather than a category, to curate my portfolio entries.
To demonstrate: My “Illustration Portfolio” is a page that displays posts pertaining to my client work. It does not show posts from my blog, for instance, since I can customize the Post Grid to show the exact categories (taxonomies) I need for my portfolio. By the same token, my blog page does not show entries from my portfolio, because of the ability to decide on what categories it can and cannot show.
In my past experience, achieving this outcome took a lot of work. It involved a lengthy process that started with looking for category IDs and ended with inserting shortcodes.
As a matter of fact, Spectra’s Post Grid block should be in high demand among food bloggers, among others. In the past, I used to look for WordPress food themes as a foundation for my websites, because they offered the most versatility. Like many food bloggers, I wanted a theme that offered widgetized recipe or category indexes. With Spectra, you can build as many recipe indexes as you like, using the Post Grid.
I can wax lyrical about other blocks offered by Spectra (such as the schema block for FAQs), but I thought of sharing the things that are most relevant to me as an illustrator. I hope my experience inspires other artists to give Spectra a try.