Overview
The problem: Selling art and networking as a freelance artist is difficult. Using social media to showcase and advertise sounds like a great start, however it is easy to get lost in the sea of profiles on social media sites. Art can thrive in community, though, and perhaps one can be created around UH Mānoa.
The solution: The Art Hub or Hui Kiʻi application will provide a centralized directory for artists at and near UH Mānoa and their art. The Hub is a platform that specifically brings artists together, from amateurs to professionals, to showcase, advertise, and sell their products.
Approach
Art Hub has three user roles: artists, collectors, and administrators. Any user can have any role, or more than one (you can be an artist and a collector, for instance). Artists have additional tools to post art and create galleries. Collectors have tools to make offers to purchase art. Hub Admins have the ability to edit the data associated with artists, ensuring site content is appropriate.
Artists can post a profile describing their work as an essay. They can also post both individual works and galleries organizing multiple individual works. They can edit (CRUD) their own art and galleries. Each user may display a gallery on their page that can host their completed works or things they are currently working on.
Collectors can specify interest areas, and be notified when a new artwork is created matching that interest area. Interests can include media, content, and size.
Admins can monitor the site for inappropriate content, and create new categories of musical tastes, capabilities, and goals. They can edit any artwork or gallery.
Mockup page ideas
Some possible mockup pages include:
- Home-Page
- Login/Register
- Profile
- Gallery
- Special Events
- Friends/Followers
- Reviews
- Verification
- Chat
Use case ideas
Whether or not the following bullet points list all pages or not, the completed use case should show an end-to-end scenario of using the system.
- New user goes to landing page, logs in, gets home page, sets up profile. (How do they learn how system works?)
- Admin goes to landing page, logs in, gets home page, edits site.
- Collector user goes to landing page, logs in, looks for art of interest.
- Hub admin goes into site, reviews new art and artists for appropriateness.
- When a user enters the website, they are able to view the revolving gallery and are able to login or create an account, and search for art/artists to purchase from.
- Account creation allows the user to create either an artist account.
- Registered art users can display their products, make connections with other artists, and collaborate on art projects.
- Registered collector accounts can connect with artists for purchasing artwork, write and post reviews about specific artists, and follow artists of their choosing.
- All user profiles may contain basic info such as name/handle, brief introduction, preferred contact, and social media links.
- Artist profile pages include a showcase of art they have created and wish to sell.
Beyond the basics
After implementing the basic functionality, here are ideas for more advanced features:
- Upload galleries from a directory of files.
- Create a map of galleries, including a suggested walking tour.
- Notify admins when art or galleries or profiles change so they can review for appropriateness.
- Showcase: A set of users (let’s say 5 or so) are featured on the homepage with a profile card of each user’s gallery, and clicking the profile card links to that user’s page.
- Collaboration: Artists can collaborate on projects by joining an organization. This would be similar to GitHub’s organization system.
- Showcase monthly competitions or special events: An example of this would be Inktober during the month of October, where different artists can showcase their work each day as a challenge and help encourage them to draw every day for that specific month.
- Friends list: Be able to add other artists in the community as a friend
- Chat Box: Let other artists communicate with each other on our website
- Artist ratings: Implementation of a user’s “Artist score/rating” via database in PostgreSQL
- Consider the use an LLM or image analysis to automatically generate tags or short descriptions for uploaded artwork. Describe whether and how this would be appropriate in an essay. Consider how data annotators are employed, as reported here in this investigation. How will artists likely react to such a feature?
Brook Conner dbconner
Student Created Project
This project was originally proposed by ICS314 students during the Spring of 2025:
- Joshua Cooperrider
- Darin Wong
- Rolando Cadiz
- Keita Grant
- Justin Barrett