What if that same impulse could take you somewhere?
That's the question behind Art Universe — an infinite art discovery experience built entirely in Figma Make.
Most museum apps show you art. Art Universe pulls you through it.
You start with one painting. Hold to explore. Suddenly you're looking at every artist who worked in the same decade, used the same technique, painted the same subject on the other side of the world. One artwork becomes a portal. Then another. Then another.
Van Gogh leads to Monet leads to a Japanese woodblock print from the same era. You don't browse. You dive.
Along the way you can:
Search by anything -> artist, era, style, mood
Switch between gallery, wander, and focus modes
Set your ambiance -> music, light, dark
Hold any artwork to enter the Curatorial Universe, a constellation of connected art built around that one piece
This isn't a museum. It's a universe.
Built with Figma Make, pulling live from four open-access museum APIs : Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The Met, and the Smithsonian.
The constellation model for related works is the right metaphor for how art history actually works. Most discovery tools treat artworks as separate cards. Treating one as a portal to everything connected to it is a genuinely different way of thinking about the problem.
Marigold was a one-day concept for a design challenge. I set the direction in real photography before generating anything.
That order matters more than people think. If you generate first, you're negotiating with whatever the model offers. If you shoot or choose real references first, you've set a standard the rest of the work has to meet.
The tool didn't set the taste. It matched a bar that already existed.
Arteway sells access to how working artists actually think. That's a hard thing to hold onto once you're at 15,000 students across 50-plus countries.
The risk with education platforms at that size is that the intimacy gets designed out. Everything gets standardized until it reads like a textbook with better photography.
So the identity leans on the work itself. High-contrast type, a frame that behaves like a studio window, and enough restraint to let a canvas stay a canvas.
Scale doesn't have to flatten a brand. It just makes the original intention harder to protect.
The intimacy usually dies in the product layer before it dies in the identity. At 15k students you are not writing copy anymore, you are deciding how many people share a cohort, how often the platform speaks to them, and whether the feedback loop runs through a human or a...