Art & Venue was a startup pitch focused on providing artists with a new way to book venues. Our pilot was one of the 10 finalists of the Harvard Business School's Deans' Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge of 2013.

In this small-team project, I was the sole designer and alongside the team helped shape the product vision for the pitch.

Art & Venue's product would let venues open up excess inventory (weekdays, earlier hours), and allow artists to pre-book those venues. The artists would then crowdfund the event by selling tickets for it, confirming the venue booking and the event only when enough tickets had been sold to cover the venue's price. The revenue from ticket sales beyond the venue's price would go to the artist. Art & Venue would make money from ticket sale fees.

Art & Venue would have to serve 3 distinct audiences:

• Venue owners/managers adding their listings and managing artist applications.
• Artists finding venues, and setting up and managing events.
• Fans browsing events and buying tickets to support artists they want to see.

The Pitch

After discussing and consolidating our concept, I worked on designs the presentation, which included summarizing the product vision for a fully built Art & Venue. Here's what I focused on for the pitch:

The Landing Page

This would be how both our potential audiences would find us. We were new, so the page had to be appealing and trustworthy – and the how it worked had to be explained very well, for all 3 audiences. However, artists were the key target. Venues could be attracted with sales tactics and fans would come once artists were in.

I designed the page, spec'd it for our full stack engineer and helped implementation and QA. It was live and demoed for the presentation.

The Artist Platform

Next, I designed a rough form of the artist account page to demonstrate the basics of account setup. After that, I mocked an in-progress event that would have been created by an artist. For this view I showed how it would look from the fan's point of view.

The Brand

One of the most fun aspects of the product was creating this capsule brand. It applied to all designs made for the competition, and served as a positive differentiator from many other applicants that had neglected or compromised on this aspect of their pitch.