Profreshionalism.app
Identity
UX/UI Design
Profreshionalism was once one of the biggest online retailers of underground graffiti and street art books in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. At one point it had the largest centralized inventory of street art books, prints and other ephemeral items in the street art world. Profreshionalism, entering a new decade with new emerging web3 technologies, wanted to restructure itself as a marketplace for physical street art and a place to buy and sell NFT’s that are street art oriented. I was tasked with revamping it’s identity as a brand and creating the UX/UI design for the launch of its new platform – Profreshionalism.app.
Overview
Street art/graffiti are its own particular niche in the art world. (In this article I am going to use street art and graffiti interchangably to describe the same thing) Graffiti is done on the street and generally exists temporarily until it gets painted over. For something so fleeting, there is great effort behind this particular work and street artists rarely get compensated. Graffiti artists generally do it for clout, and other than bringing it to a gallery setting, artists don’t get paid for it. “Fame is the name of the game” for these artists. Once your name is big enough street artists generally start selling their own merchandise and products as a brand or team up with other companies to do collaborations. The biggest purveyors of this strategy are artist’s such as KAWS and Shepard Fairey.
Graffiti is an esoteric and niche category of art but is quite large in scale. This creates a huge market for street art collectables that sometimes become very valuable as a larger audience catches onto a particular artist. It has a devout following that creates its own economy. These collectors will buy small run time zines, books, stickers, clothing, limited edition products — anything that some artists will put out. As time passes these collectors item’s go up in value depending if the artist has become more recognizable and the scarcity of what was produced.
The Problems
1. There is no dedicated centralized directory of where street art and it’s collectors items cost in the past.
The most common place that street art collectables get sold is eBay.
eBay as a marketplace is too vast and chaotic to clearly show and track what certain items were sold for. It is possible, but for a user of the product it should be more straight forward and direct. There are also no marketplaces that sell both NFT’s and physical art. Profreshionalism is here to help solve the problem of this inconvenience. This makes it a true directory of street art in physical and digital form.
2. There are dozens of NFT marketplaces at this point, why Profreshionalism?
Profreshionalism itself is an online retailer that already has a reputation amongst “graffheads”. This is why customers would rather use Profeshionalism.app as an NFT market place. It’s trusted as a source of knowledge. In this particular niche market NFT’s are a perfect tool to preserve street art.
With the advent of blockchain technology and NFT’s this changes the way street art can be valued, collected and owned. The legitimacy and documentation of street art and graffiti can be minted onto the blockchain and then sold.
It would be of use to serious collectors wanting to own footage of the piece where the graffiti took place. Where would this have value? This would have serious value in the metaverse.
Disregard the tabloid hooey. The metaverse will be used as a tool to recreate what places have looked like in the past. These NFT’s of graffiti pieces would be of great value to someone who wanted to recreate a particular place or setting– and it would allow the artist to get compensated.
There are a bunch of graffiti artists who would love to go back and explore what a city was like at a particular place and time.
For example, many would love to go back to 5Pointz in Long Island City in New York City during its hay day.
This is exemplified by the fact that there are currently people who collect vintage trains to recreate certain American railroads. There is a niche market of train collectors who send out particular train models to graffiti writers who have painted on these railway cars in real life. They pay graffiti artists to recreate their tags on collectable train cars so they can perfectly recreate a real train set in a particular time that is historically accurate. Personally, I find this amazing and I believe that this will perfectly translate to the way street art will be preserved in the metaverse.
Minting an NFT through Professionalism would be creating a certificate of authenticity of a particular graffiti piece that once existed. Graffiti artist’s can mint their own pieces and sell the ownership to someone who wants to own art and a piece of history of a particular building or object.
Logotype
Originally made in 2008 the Profreshionalism logo is a rip off of the New York Post logo. Within street art culture, logo appropriation is big (think Barbara Kruger and Supreme). The New York Post logo is a classic logo that represents trashy urban news. The original logo had to be revamped. Adding “.app” to the end and introducing a monochromatic color palette to help establish it to be a digital product in its next phase.
UX / UI Design
The navigation bar is set into two tiers. The first bar is dedicated to your user profile settings and selling product if you would like to.
The second tiered navigation bar is dedicated to finding information and exploration of collectable art.
Purchasable art is displayed with 2 items in each row to see it as clearly as possible with an overview.
Price’s are displayed with both their value in ETH and USD (or whichever currency your profile is set to). This is important because a lot of NFT marketplaces emphasize using the price of the crypto. Users do not follow price in decimal format. We are naturally inclined to look at the price of objects in our native currency. Both prices are there to help users understand what the value of a certain collectable actually is.
NFT Display
Physical Art Display
The physical art display is slightly different than the NFT display. User’s native currency is shown and emphasized for physical items. It’s most common that people would like to sell or buy using their native currency for physical items. This preference is interchangable though.
The items sell history on the platform is shown organized by the date sold. Customers can get an idea of what the item is valued through its history and their own judgement.
Users are given more options other than to make an offer and are able to add the item into their carts.
