BRTR
BRTR (say it "baar-tr") is a platform where artists trade handmade work with each other as well as sell it. My capstone for the Thinkful UX/UI bootcamp, built in a three week sprint from conversations with working artists.
Help artists sell in a world that moved online
I started by talking to artists and creatives about what felt hardest coming out of the pandemic. The same answer kept surfacing. Art fairs, popups, and in person shopping had thinned out, and selling had moved somewhere crowded and impersonal. Many of them also missed their community of fellow artists.
So the question became: can we make a way to consume ethically and support small makers nearby? BRTR is my answer. Artists trade work directly with each other, buyers can shop from them too, and every cent goes to the artist.
Learn from what already exists
I pulled apart Etsy and Simbi, a site for trading services. Etsy gets plenty right: a clear mission, obvious calls to action, and categories that make browsing easy. It also shows pitfalls worth designing around. The homepage overwhelms with information, the videos pull focus, and the marketplace is crowded with bulk and third party items far from handmade.
Then I ran surveys and interviews, partly to test the idea and partly to decide what to build. Two things came back loud and clear: people want to know how much of their money reaches the artist, and community is the very heart of why the whole thing works.
Survey finding
17 of 20
said they'd barter handmade goods with other creatives.
From an interview
"All proceeds should go to the artist."
This line shaped the business model as much as the copy.
Two people I kept designing for
Johnny, 28, makes art and just moved to a new city. He wants recognition and trades with other artists, but markets near him are seasonal and he dreads marketing himself online. Melissa, 41, wants to buy handmade and local. She's disabled, so reaching markets to find small merchants takes real effort.
Between them, four needs outranked everything else and became the spine of the build:
- Make a fair trade with another user.
- Buy directly from creators.
- Trust the person on the other end of the transaction.
- Talk to that person easily.
Sketch first, Figma later
I brainstormed on paper before opening Figma: what the brand should feel like, what the mark could be, and how a trade would work as a screen. The trade was the puzzle. Both people have to accept before anything goes through, and that one rule ended up shaping the entire flow.
A style tile before a single screen
Bold, idyllic, community, futuristic. I set the palette, the textures, the type and the core icons in one tile first, so every screen after it had a single source to answer to.
What it became
Four screens carry the idea. A home that leads with trading, a mission page that says plainly where the money goes, a product page where messaging the maker sits level with requesting a trade, and the trade request itself, where you set your work beside theirs and both sides agree.
