Most recently, I designed and built a new way for fine art painters to discover paints. It's called Paint List.

In less than a year, Paint List has been enjoyed by thousands of users from over 85 countries.

It solves the problem of paint comparison and discovery across brands. Currently, the general experience of getting artist paints online is siloed between brands and forces the artist to dig for key information about the paints.

Paint List takes down the walls between brands as well as makes the key information easier to find. It also brings a new dimension to paint comparison and discovery.

We started talking about, researching, and sketching out the project in Q4 of 2023. At first, we were looking into using some site builder like Webflow, but it's database service was way too limited. So then we looked into some no-code/low-code solutions and eventually found FlutterFlow. That was exciting and we even set up a Firebase account to store the data, but we ended up running into a dead end when it came to creating a robust search for the site.

Search is key for this project.

So, I decided to dust off my HTML and Javascript chops and I learned React.js as well as Next.js. It was a trial by fire, but we ended setting up and bringing in data from a Supabase database and even building a nice-working search!

For a better understanding of what Paint List is solving, let's take a look at the paint shopping experience at a major retailer.

Below, we see the experience of searching for "cadmium red" on Blick.com

There are a variety of products that come up, some of which have nothing to do with cadmium red.

Adding in "oil paint" into the search query helps a little, but the resutls are still siloed by brand and the key information about the paints is still hard to find.

Once the user clicks into one of the brands, they are presented with a list of paints. The user then has to click into each paint to find the key information about the paint. This is a very time-consuming process.

Paint List solves these problems by bringing all the paints together in one place and making the key information about the paints easier to find. It also brings a new dimension to paint comparison and discovery.

The search function is given priority and is easy to access. A person can type in a color name, pigment code, or brand. It's even possible to constrain the search to only find single-pigment paints.

A search for cadmium red shows paints across brands with “cadmium red” in the title. To the best of our knowledge, this search capability is the first of its kind in the industry.

The paint tile is designed to give users the most important information at a glance: the color, brand, name, and pigment code. The user can click into the paint to see even more information.

The paint page has a Paint List review (where available) and information from the manufacturer. It also includes a module to help the users shop that paint. At the bottom of each page there are a few modules to help users find related paints.

I learned a whole lot through the process and look forward to creating other tools and experiences in the future.

Shortly after we launched, several executives from Old Holland (a premium artist paint company) began following our Instagram channel before we even had two posts.

It's also been great to see other artists referencing the site and saying how much they love it.

Now that we have an initial version out, we're working on creating a new iteration of the site design and functionality as well as expanding to pastels and paint brushes.