Antro

Emerging artists compete for limited exhibition space, often through systems shaped by submission fees, networks and gatekeeping. At the same time, people can be interested in art without finding conventional gallery environments particularly accessible or engaging. Antro was my attempt to explore both sides of that problem through a working product: a platform where artists could present and curate their work in virtual space and audiences could experience exhibitions online.

I built every layer myself: research, UX, visual identity, front end, back end, database and the 3D gallery. I spoke to people across different sides of the art ecosystem, including emerging artists, curators and audiences engaging with art online. Three recurring problems shaped the product direction:

Cost: Submission fees and commission structures can create barriers for emerging artists.

Gatekeeping: Access to opportunities is often influenced by networks and existing visibility.

Flatness: Physical work loses scale, spatial relationships and some of its material presence when reduced to an image grid.

Those findings shaped the product priorities: giving artists a professional space to present work, preserving more spatial context than a conventional portfolio grid, and connecting presentation more closely to opportunities.

I developed personas spanning artist, curator and audience roles and mapped the journeys that mattered most, including an artist moving from signup to exhibiting work and a visitor moving from arrival to sustained engagement with an exhibition. The design moved from lo-fi exploration to hi-fi interface design, brand development and implementation. Several constraints became particularly important during the process: reducing unnecessary friction in portfolio administration, making a platform asking artists to upload their work feel credible, keeping the value of maintaining a profile visible, and making sure that the spatial experience did not become a new accessibility barrier.

The platform was built as a full-stack web application, with Node.js and MongoDB supporting a JavaScript front end and a 3D gallery environment built with Three.js. Artists could create profiles, upload work and curate exhibitions in navigable virtual space; visitors could explore those exhibitions through the browser. Building the entire stack myself meant design and implementation could never be treated as separate exercises. Interface decisions immediately encountered database structure, performance, authentication, file handling and technical feasibility.

That experience still shapes the way I design: I want to understand not only what an experience should do, but what it would actually take to build and operate it. Antro became a functioning platform, but its biggest methodological weakness is also one of the most useful things the project taught me. I did research before designing it, but I did not run sufficiently structured user testing before committing to the full implementation. Much of the feedback came once substantial parts of the system already existed. In other words: I built too much before testing enough.

That is exactly backwards from how I work now. My later behavioural-design projects begin by defining the mechanism, intervention and validation approach before committing to a build.

Antro therefore matters to me for two reasons: it proves I can take a digital product from research to functioning software alone, and it marks the point from which my process became much more rigorous about testing what should be built before building it.