I worked on designing this product over the course of more than four years at both the College of Lake County (CLC) and the University of Minnesota (UMN). My goal was to design an app that could help creatives make valuable local connections and build community.

I started by interviewing dozens of early career artists and creatives about their struggles both personal and career related. I found that the missing ingredient for many artists struggling to get started was opportunity. I also found that for artists who had gotten their start, those opportunities really came from being connected to the right person at the right time. Most of the problem they faced was that they need opportunities to develop their professional reputation, so that opportunities would begin to present themselves.

I took my findings and came up with a solution. Artists need a way to make friends, meet collaborators, and cultivate valuable connections. They need to do it a lot and quickly. There really wasn't anything for artists quite like that, but the dating industry of course had plenty of options for speedy connections with apps like bumble and tinder. In a way, so did the professional world with LinkedIn. So I designed a UX prototype on Adobe XD for an app that would let artists make connections.

With a free artist membership to Mäkit, creatives can filter other users with parameters like creative background, location, and school. They can then browse these users’ portfolios of work and message a creative they are interested in socializing, networking, or collaborating with.

Users can also begin group conversations, or invite peers, friends, and clients to list themselves as a reference or leave comments and testimonials on their profile. They can also sync their Mäkit profile to an automatically generated personal website hosted at their own domain, so they don’t have to spend extra time and money on a squarespace or wix website.

By providing them with a comfortable user experience and powerful search parameters, Mäkit allows creatives to socialize, network, and collaborate with more freedom and higher ambition than ever before. If creatives use Mäkit they will build a foundation of close social connections much faster, decreasing the risk of depression. They will also have more luck finding collaborators for specific projects and be able to network without having to go to overwhelming social functions by themselves.