LEX.art

Art Investment Platform · Co-founded & fully built by me (startup now inactive).

🚨 Problem

The traditional art market is opaque, exclusive, and stagnant. Galleries hide prices behind “price upon request,” artist sales histories are inaccessible, and a handful of NYC institutions control which 1 in 500 artists succeed. Investors face ambiguous valuations, while global art sales have plateaued around $60B for a decade.

🎨 Wireframes & UX Design

I designed parallel experiences for Artists and Investors, ensuring both could sign up, manage portfolios, and participate in auctions seamlessly. Wireframes guided our UX iterations before moving into high-fidelity UI.

⚙️ Technical Architecture

I architected and built the full codebase (frontend, backend, infra). The startup is no longer active, so the code cannot be hosted publicly, but here’s the stack and problems solved:

• Frontend: Nuxt 3 (Vue 3) with Tailwind + SCSS for responsive UI
• Backend: NestJS with CQRS for auctions, articles, and artwork events
• Database: Prisma ORM with Postgres
• Infra: Google Cloud Run + Artifact Registry for containerized deployments
• Realtime: Firebase Firestore for notifications & user activity
• Notifications: Event handlers pushed updates to Firestore & email via SendGrid

🎭 Style & Tone

The brand identity was designed to express sophistication, openness, and contrarian thinking — aligning with our mission of democratizing access to the art market.

• Voice: Calm, confident, transparent, intelligent — never pretentious
• Colors: Deep blue gradients (Cerulean → Ultramarine → Cyan) with black/white contrast
• Typography: Inter typeface, hierarchy-driven, always legible
• Visual Style: Orb gradients, horizon motifs, geometric ↔ organic balance
• Photography: Cinematic, authentic, depicting artists in their natural process

📱 Final Mockups

After refining wireframes and applying our style guide, I built the polished UI: a product that balanced financial clarity with artistic creativity.

Admin Dashboard

The backend admin panel I built for managing content, tracking analytics, and overseeing the platform.

🧩 Technical Challenges

• Transparency vs. Privacy: Show profit-shares while protecting collector data.
• Event-driven complexity: CQRS events cascaded across auctions, mentions, and notifications.
• Realtime UX: Built live investor dashboards for bids and performance stats.
• Auction timing: Implemented Google Cloud Tasks to manage lot scheduling and automated closes.

📈 Impact & Growth

• Waitlist grew to 3000+ users by mid-2024
• Artists and investors onboarded in private beta
• Community channels and partnerships expanded visibility

🛠️ My Contribution

As co-founder and sole developer, I owned the entire technical lifecycle of LEX.art — from initial wireframes to production deployment. The platform spanned two repositories: app.lex.art (the core application) and lex.art (the marketing site), totaling ~370,000 lines of TypeScript across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.

• Sole developer across both repositories — every commit, PR, and deployment was mine
• Designed the full Prisma schema modeling artists, artworks, auctions, bids, transactions, and investor portfolios
• Architected and implemented the NestJS backend with CQRS pattern, writing event handlers for auction lifecycle, mentions, article publishing, and cascading notification flows
• Built the Nuxt 3 frontend (Vue 3 + Tailwind + SCSS) with parallel flows for artist onboarding, investor dashboards, and live auction participation
• Integrated Firebase Firestore for realtime notifications and user activity tracking, and SendGrid for transactional email workflows
• Set up Google Cloud Run + Artifact Registry pipelines for containerized deployments, and Google Cloud Tasks for scheduling auction lot opens and automated closes
• Owned the complete product lifecycle: UX research → Figma wireframes → high-fidelity mockups → production code → deployment and monitoring