Teal Team - Canvas Marketplace

Inspiration

The inspiration for Canvas Marketplace came after the COVID-19 pandemic. During this catastrophe, countless of small businesses were forced to shut down. Leaving many people freelancers without a stable source of income, especially those in the freelancing art community. The arts as a whole have always been undervalued in society and negatively stigmatized. From stereotypically, always being the first to go when districts are doing budget cuts. So this is where Canvas Marketplace comes in; we are a platform that allows them to showcase their work to buyers. Giving our loved artists a source where they can gain a stable source of income doing something they loved.

What it does

Canvas Marketplace is both an e-commerce and social media platform focused exclusively on the arts. The goal of this app is to connect struggling artists to customers in different communities. Artists post aesthetic photos of their work, and users have the opportunity to like the posts and follow the artists. This way, people are able to enjoy the artwork for free (using ads) but people can also buy the physical artwork from the artists.

How we built it

Canvas Marketplace was built in three processes: brainstorm, design, then execute. Our team members first brainstormed the ideas and elements we wanted to see on the app. Once we decided we all drew out how we wanted the app's layout to look and found a color palette that matched our ideal aesthetic. Once completed, we brought our ideas to life using Figma as our source. For our presentation, we created a pitch deck using google slides and recorded an app demo, which we then uploaded to Devpost.

Challenges we ran into

While developing Canvas Marketplace, we ran into a multitude of obstacles from creating an app that would stand out in an oversaturated market to work on a brand new software that we did not have much experience with. Nor did we have much time to explore the in's and out's of it. Lastly, was making a user-friendly design that appeals to our target audience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We as Canvas Marketplace, are very proud of what we accomplished with the limited time we had. We were able to create a project composed of exquisitely designed pages. Along with creating a memorable sales pitch that gets not only the attention of our target audiences. We also created a user-friendly platform that gives the benefits of social media and an e-commerce platform.

What we learned

All of our group members came in with little to no experience in UX design or creating apps. We learned to use a new design software (Figma) as well as how to create pitches that captivate the audience and promote our message.

What's next for Teal Team - Canvas Marketplace

Our next steps would include expanding our platform. We aim to do partnerships with local artists so they can spread information about our platform, as well as creating social media platforms and invest in our marketing efforts. In the future, we may also expand to include art forms aside from physical or digital art.

Built With

• figma
• google-slides