Social Club
A social platform built for creatives who want to share and curate their work away from algorithmic noise.
01
The Problem
Today's social platforms are designed to maximize screen time, not to serve communities with specific interests. For creative professionals — designers, photographers, visual curators — this means feeds dominated by forced short-form video, aggressive image compression, ad spam, and algorithms that reward virality over craft.
The result: creative professionals end up using collaborative design tools for their actual work, and generic social platforms for everything else — with no space in between built specifically for sharing, curating, and talking shop about visual work with a trusted community.
02
The Opportunity
Social Club started as a conceptual exploration of a simple question: what would a social platform look like if it were designed by and for creatives, where visual curation was the core experience rather than a side effect of the algorithm?
Instead of starting from formal interviews, this project was built around representative user personas across three distinct creative roles, each with a different relationship to current social platforms — but sharing one frustration in common: the lack of an ad-free, visual-first space free of algorithmic noise.
03
Target Users / Personas
While their roles differ, all three personas share the same core need: a curated, visual-first space free of commercial distractions to share and develop creative work alongside trusted peers.
04
How Might We
How might we design a feed that prioritizes image quality and curation over algorithmic engagement?
How might we give creators collaboration tools (moodboards, feedback) without the friction of professional software?
How might we build a curated, spam-free community without losing the spontaneity of a social platform?
05
Ideation
Sitemap — Home, Create, and Profile branches mapped out before any UI work started.
User flow — creating and sharing a post, including the moodboard save path.
Early low-fidelity pass across the core screens
06
Building the Brand
07
Key Screens
Onboarding
The first brand impression and a simple entry into the product: splash, welcome, sign up, and login.
Home & Navigation
The heart of the visual curation experience: the home feed, the create/menu flow, and messaging.
Profile
How creators present their curated work — profile with the curated image grid, and the profile edit flow.
System States
The details that keep the experience polished in every state: notifications, settings, loading, loading error, and 404.
08
Takeaways
Social Club was an exercise in designing with empathy for a problem I experience firsthand as a designer: fatigue with current social platforms and the desire for a space dedicated to visual curation. Working without formal research pushed me to lean heavily on well-defined personas to keep design decisions anchored to real needs of creative users, rather than generic assumptions.
If I continued this project, the next step would be validating these decisions with real usability testing, and further exploring the collaboration tools (shared moodboards, real-time feedback) that all three personas flagged as a core need.