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Choice Art: It's Tinder meets Spotify, but for art

over 2 years ago from , Designer

Last March, at the beginning of shelter in place my friend Dan and I started working on Choice ( https://www.choice.app/ ), a mobile app that recommends art to users based on their personal tastes. With all the galleries, theaters, and venues shut down for the foreseeable future, there seemed like no better time to focus on a project that would give us an easy way to share our favorite and newest pieces of art that we’ve discovered with our group of friends.

Tired of social media doom scrolling? Selfies and politics getting you down? Choice is a social media app that emphasizes curation over creation. Instead of users having to take photos of their food or think of creative tweets, they can explore the world of art and design while learning more about their tastes and exploring what inspires them. The user experience feels like Tinder meets Spotify but for art. Users swipe through a customized stack of content (right if they like, left if they don't). Based on your tastes, you’ll be presented with artwork that we think you’ll like but may not have discovered yet. Built to mimic the old experience of going through a record store and flipping through records, we aimed to recreate that serendipitous feeling of discovering a new favorite.

When something speaks to you or catches your eye, you can swipe up to learn more about that specific piece or view the artist’s body of work. You also have the ability to view similar artwork, leave a thought, tag and save it for later, or inspire others by pushing your new discovery to the stacks of users with similar tastes.

If those users like your recommendations, you earn “Signal” which is a numeric measure of your impact in the community. The more signal you have, the more people will see your recommendations, the more you support artists by getting their work shown.

We’re still constantly iterating on the product and would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have on how to improve it. You can learn more and download the app for iOS and Android at www.choice.app

3 comments

  • Jeff CouturierJeff Couturier, over 2 years ago

    This is an interesting concept, and seems to be really well executed so far. Nice work.

    Is all art submitted by creators? I'm mostly wondering if there is anything in place to prevent repost accounts from copying art they didn't create and posting it without permision, just like they do on other platforms

    I see that I can search for a particular artist, but there doesn't seem to be a way to search by tag/topic. So if I'm interested in scifi illustration, for example, I can't search or filter for that, and I think many users first instinct would be to search for things they're interested in.

    Great work so far, I really like the potential here.

    2 points
    • Jonathan Smith, over 2 years ago

      Hi Jeff,

      Thanks so much for checking out the app, we truly appreciate it. Lots of the art is submitted by the creators. We run a weekly $350 art contest so we're seeing lots of great artist submissions. You bring up a great point about reposts. As an artist myself, one of the main goals in creating this app was to be sure artists got proper attribution. We see tons of reposts on other platforms that never credit the artist or give information on where we can see more of their work.

      All of our uploads are checked against the existing collection so there are never duplicates on the platform. Another goal of ours was sharing and discovering new artists with friends and the community. So it's possible to upload artwork that you just come across that isn't yours but you wanted to turn others on to. Users are encouraged and rewarded to attribute the work to the proper artist and it will be associated and presented on that artists' profile.

      To view artwork by tag/topic you can simply swipe up on a card to view the details of each piece. From there you will see all the tags associated with that artwork and have the ability to generate a stack of artwork that you can swipe through based on the tag you have selected. In the details we also recommend similar artwork that you may not have seen and might want to browse.

      We're constantly learning, iterating, and improving so we really appreciate any feedback and ideas you might have.

      Thanks again, Jon

      1 point
      • Jeff CouturierJeff Couturier, over 2 years ago

        Thanks for the reply Jon, and great answers all around. I missed the tag options and will play around with those for sure. Again, nice work. I think you're on to something great with this.

        2 points