One of the reasons why I felt inspired to work on this app concept is because of the growing need people seem to be having towards art and any form of artistic and creative expression or activities.

According to studies, the majority of Americans would much prefer to have creative hobbies or stimulation, as opposed to other forms of stimulation/entertainment like TV or Netflix. 

Studies also show that the majority of people believe in the importance of art being taught in K-12 and that people recognize the importance and benefits that art and creativity offers to the people who practice it.

Especially ever since the pandemic happened, while people were in lockdown, it offered the opportunity for people to reflect on how they spend their free time while we were all stuck in our homes. Over the years, people have been starting to value having creative hobbies as a way to destress, enjoy themselves or even as a way to also help with their mental health.

In summary, some of the issues people are facing is being able to find and connect with others who love art and are supportive of artists. 

For existing artists and creatives, being a part of a community that is completely centred and revolves around art can be a way to get them inspired, give them more ideas for artistic creations they may come up with next, and receive the support and appreciation they would like to get from fellow artists and creatives to encourage them to continue on their artistic journey as sometimes, people can get discouraged from continuing the practice of art when they're not able to receive support from others in their creative pursuits.

Once the problem and the solution were identified, I then started to draft the information architecture of the app which displays the different screens that the app will contain.

Once all the different screens that the app will contain have been planned out, the only thing left is the branding of the app before we can move on to the design of the app (UI - User Interface). 

I then started with designing the actual UI screens of the Artem. Below I will show you all  the screens this app contains, but before that, I will also show the first versions of the design of some screens I designed and the reasoning why I changed the design to the one that exists in the final version.

Below are the login and sign up screens. The first version I created had a somewhat minimalist and clean design with it just having a plain white background.

I thought this needed to be changed, seeing as how this is an app catered towards artists and creatives, that it needed to have something more creative and visually exciting to look at as these first screens are what the users will be first met with when they use the app and first impressions matter a lot especially when it comes to user experience.

I ended up adding more imagery of different types of art creations to give a preview of what the app is about while also serving as a visual component that makes the design more visually interesting.

Below are the different versions of the homepage that I came up with. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to design the homepage as this is the screen that matters the most, as this is where the users will be spending most of their time within the app as they browse through the different art in their newsfeed.

The first version of the homepage only showcased one row of posts which I found to be visually not engaging enough and could potentially lose users' retention. 

Because of that, I created version 2 which has 2 different rows of posts which I found to be more visually engaging, but I feared that it was too similar to Pinterest's design and I didn't want to just emulate an already existing design out there.

I ended up creating a final version of the homepage's design, which is version 3, which still contained 2 rows of posts as opposed to one, but I stretched out the posts so that they reached over the edges to give the posts more room to showcase themselves and also didn't round out the edges of the posts to differentiate the design further while still being able to maintain that visually engaging aspect that the version 1 design lacked.

Below are the different screens I designed for Artem. Have a look!