That makes it a three-sided marketplace, with all the trust, discovery, and booking mechanics each side demands: hosts listing and managing an evening, artists building a profile and gaining exposure, and the public browsing concerts and purchasing tickets. There was no existing product to refine: this was a greenfield MVP, designed and built from zero while the founders were still on the venture-capital circuit. Therefore, every screen had to do double duty: function as a real product and stand up as the artifact that helped tell the story to investors.
As Lead Designer I owned the whole surface: the information architecture, the three registration and onboarding flows, the matching and discovery experience, the ticket-purchase path and a custom checkout module, and a full component inventory built to scale as features were added. Because the product was also the pitch, the work extended well past interface design into the entire brand: identity, SEO, and the motion graphics that gave a young company presence it couldn't yet afford to buy. Every one of those pieces went beyond the original ask, but on an MVP with everything to prove, they were the difference between a prototype and something that felt real.
Where the project became a true test of range was at the line between design and engineering, the place I'm most comfortable. Rather than hand off static comps, I created the template pages by coding the front-end HTML and CSS myself so the engineering team could take clean, on-spec markup, while allowing them to focus instead on the deeper application logic and API queries. I also built the in-app and email notifications; all the SEO content and programming; the transactional email templates in Sendgrid and their connection to the right moments in each user's workflow: the confirmations and notifications that keep a marketplace's three sides in sync. It's the kind of contribution that only happens when a designer can actually speak and write the language of the build: nothing was lost in translation, because I was working on both sides of it.
