OBGillustrator

OBGillustrator sells photography prints, original fine art and archival reprints, takes commission work, and shows the design side of the business. One site doing the job of a gallery, a print shop and a portfolio.

Buying a print is the part that got the most attention. You choose a size and whether you want metal or canvas, and the page tells you before you buy how much of the photograph that size will crop away — and which size loses the least. A magnifier follows your cursor so you can see the detail you are paying for; on a phone it sits above your fingertip instead of underneath it, where your finger would cover the thing you are trying to see. Checkout is Stripe's own, so card and Apple Pay both work, and shipping is collected for six countries.

She runs everything else: upload work and drag it into the order she wants, set the price table, mark an order shipped with its tracking number, edit around twenty blocks of wording across the site, switch commissions open or closed, and take a full backup in one file. There is also a small tool that reads a new piece's title and description and suggests its Instagram hashtags — she asked for it, and she uses it.

On the money side the site never trusts the price the browser sends. Every item is re-checked against the price list on the server before a payment is created, and if that list cannot be read the checkout refuses rather than accepting whatever it was handed — an earlier version would have taken a fifty-cent print. Photographs survive every update, and each is served at the size the visitor's screen actually needs, so nobody's phone downloads a print-quality file.