Social Platform for Artists
Role: Lead Product Designer (End-to-End)
Goals: To create a social network for artists — a space where creators and art lovers could connect. We needed to find a unique angle that would give users a reason to leave platforms like Pinterest or Facebook and join ours instead.
Description
The project is a social platform for art lovers and creators. Users can explore a feed of artworks, save pieces to personal collections, publish their own art boards and blog posts, and interact with others through comments and likes. The goal was to combine content discovery, self‑expression, and social interaction in one seamless experience.
Analysis of Behance, Pinterest, and Facebook
Identified market gap: no platform offered both high-resolution artwork display and deep social interaction
Developed unique value proposition: universal creative freedom
Key Innovations Delivered
User flows and CJM
Interactive prototyping and usability testing
Comprehensive design system with typography, color palette, and components
Responsive design for all devices (mobile → desktop)
Competitors
I studied both direct and indirect competitors: Facebook (social feed and posts), Pinterest (art boards and collections), and Behance (project grid and presentation). The goal was to merge their strongest features into a single platform where users can discover, curate, publish, and socialize — all in one place.
Home page
We decided to take the familiar Facebook feed as a reference but added a 'comments' section to the homepage (right sidebar) to motivate user to leave new comment. Every new comment would appear on the homepage, making activity visible to everyone. The long‑term plan was to surface the most discussed topics or artworks in this section.
Below are a few categories shown in the site header: Daizy (a gallery of AI‑generated artworks based on user prompts), Artworks and Artboards (user‑created galleries).👇
Profile page
We introduced a visual marker for artists — a red badge (or a red accent in the profile name on mobile). This way, when an artist uploaded their work, they could immediately stand out from casual art lovers.
Each profile also had two modes: edit mode and view mode — similar to what you see on LinkedIn today.
Artwork page
On each artwork page, users could comment, like, or save the piece to their personal artboard. We also showed engagement stats — saves, views, likes, and so on. Later, we decided to display approximate numbers instead of exact counts. The idea was to give emerging artists a boost without making them feel discouraged by smaller numbers.
Boards page
Artboards were a whole different challenge. Similar collections exist on Pinterest, so we wanted to go further — we gave users the ability to fully customize the page and turn it into a real gallery. We added a customizable header and a description field. And of course, anyone could leave a comment on an artboard too.
Outcomes
Boards page
organic users per month within the first 6 months with zero marketing budget, driven entirely by product excellence.
Built a flexible design system that reduced future development time by an estimated 40% and ensured visual consistency.
User adoption and retention were achieved through product quality and seamless experience, not paid acquisition.