Talent
A licensing platform for Russian-speaking creators — designed after every major international service became inaccessible. Not a response to a brief. A response to a market gap I'd been living inside for years.
Why
I spent years working with YouTubers and production teams across Russia. Everyone used the same stack: Artlist, Freepik, Epidemic Sound, Envato. After the blocks, that stack collapsed overnight. Creators were left using VPNs, foreign bank cards, grey-zone workarounds — legally and operationally exposed. I looked for a Russian alternative that covered video, audio, and text licensing in one place. It didn't exist. Still doesn't. That's not a niche — that's an entire creative economy without infrastructure.
What
I designed Talent from the ground up: a multi-format licensing platform covering images, video footage, music, sound effects, and written content (scripts, voiceover text) under a single roof. The content model combines subscription tiers — per-category or all-access — with direct purchase, where buying a work removes it from the platform and signals exclusivity. I studied every major competitor in detail: Envato's monetisation logic, Artlist's tagging and UI, Freepik's multi-format approach. The text category — scripts and voiceover copy as licensable assets — I added myself. I hadn't seen it done anywhere. The result: 45 screens, 17 modal states and error flows, a fully interactive Figma prototype with realistic content throughout.
How
The core UX challenge was information architecture across fundamentally different content types. Video, audio, and text behave differently — different previews, different metadata, different purchase logic. I built a unified top-level navigation with category filters that split cleanly into sub-types: video into vertical and horizontal, audio into music and sound effects. The Mix mode was the hardest to think through — a smart cross-category search that surfaces relevant video, music, and ambient sound simultaneously for a single creative intent. That required working out the tagging logic across all content types before designing a single screen. The business logic — author payouts, commission structure, licensing tiers — was mapped before the interface, not after.
What it looks like
What we delivered
Desktop, Russian — fully interactive prototype in Figma
Error flows, empty states, upload windows, confirmation dialogs
Images, video, audio, text, Mix — one unified system
No comparable Russian-market platform exists today
The design is complete and prototype-ready. Development requires significant infrastructure investment — separate rendering engines per content type, payment integration, author dashboards. The desktop design is ready to hand off. Mobile and tablet versions are the next design phase. The market gap it addresses hasn't closed in two years.
Starting from zero?
A blank page is where I do my best work. Tell me about the product.
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