ArtHaven

About ArtHaven

ArtHaven is a social platform for artists, built around one idea: you should be able to show your work without handing it over. Artists share their pieces, follow and support each other, message directly, and compete in community art contests, all on top of a protection feature that makes posted artwork awkward to steal.

The app was designed end to end in Figma. Its onboarding flow sets out the five things it is for: share your artworks, protect your artworks, follow your favourite artists, show your support, and participate in competitions.

Problem statement

Posting art online means giving anyone who visits a clean copy of it. Screenshots and reposts travel without credit, and the artist has no say once the image is out. Existing platforms are built for reach rather than for protection, so guarding a piece falls entirely on the artist.

Features in ArtHaven

Cloaking. The protection feature, and the reason the app exists. Artwork posted to ArtHaven is cloaked, so the pixels shift if someone tries to screenshot it or otherwise lift a copy, and what gets captured is not what was on display. When adding a piece the user picks a source from the photo gallery or camera, and the cloaking prompt runs before the post goes up. It is on by default, and an artist who wants a particular piece left untouched can opt out.

This is the concept-stage part of the design. The mechanism we had in mind was something in the family of diffusion-based pixel perturbation, but that was a suggestion sketched during design rather than anything built or tested, and whether it would hold up against a real screenshot is an open question.

Explore. The social feed, where art is browsed rather than searched. Posts can be filtered by the kind of work a user actually enjoys, such as 3D modelling, cartoons or scenery, so the feed narrows to what they came for. Fandom tags like Genshin work the same way.

Posting and tags. A new post carries an image, a caption and tags. Those tags are what feed Explore, so tagging on the way in is what makes filtering work on the way out.

Messages. Direct conversations between artists, for commissions, feedback, or simply talking to someone whose work you follow.

Competitions. Community art contests run inside the app, such as a summer fanart competition. Users enter their own work and vote on everyone else's, picking first and second place. Announcements and results appear in the updates feed.

Trophies and badges. Competition winners earn digital trophies, and badges recognise things like best technique. Both sit on the artist's profile next to their gallery, so a profile shows standing as well as work.

How are different features integrated together?

Cloaking is applied at the point of posting, so every piece that reaches Explore or a competition is already protected unless the artist chose otherwise. Nothing has to be switched on separately.

Tags do double duty. The same tag that categorises a post in Explore also sorts competition entries, so a fanart contest draws from the tag rather than from a separate submission pile.

Competitions feed back into profiles. Winning one adds a trophy to the artist's page, visible to anyone who reaches them through Explore or a message.

Why is ArtHaven unique?

• Protection is the default rather than something to go and find, since cloaking runs on every post unless the artist opts out.
• Discovery is filtered by the kind of art a user enjoys, instead of by an algorithm guessing at it.
• Competitions, voting and trophies give artists a reason to keep posting beyond follower counts.

Click the preview above to explore the full design file on Figma.