Elkli & Hart Limited

Elkli & Hart is a UK based startup that focusses on raising awareness for the power of art, creative development, and creative education. With these values at its core, it is creating partnerships, building a community, selling museum quality prints to reinvest into its mission, and launching a magazine to facilitate its vision.

In between the regular projects that pay the bills, this has been a really exciting project to work on. It's been wonderful to be free to design UIs in my own style, yet keeping it all organised and professional, just like any other client project. Keeping it fun whilst retaining the end user in mind has been an enjoyable balance.

As for development, on the backend I really enjoyed learning Payload CMS, and the Stripe SDK for dynamic cart payment integration, authentication and event listening via webhooks. On the frontend I have partnered it with NextJS, and really enjoyed seeing why React-Query is so hyped — using it for product querying and filtering has been a pleasure. The fullstack solution is 100% TypeScript and has been an absolute joy to build.

On the print side, I spent six months in research, reading around 100 academic papers on creativity, art, education et al., and then enjoyed the process of learning both the quirks and powers of Adobe InDesign to design and edit my first publication: Beyond Creativity (get yourself a free copy at that link, and learn more).