Buttermilk - discover & support 🇲🇾 artists

Product: Buttermilk What is it: A directory Main tool used: Webflow Supplementary tools: Google Form, Airtable, Zapier Difficulty level: High (Requires more learning on Webflow)

Buttermilk is a directory platform to showcase, discover, and support Malaysian artists. We welcome artists who do art on canvases, be it digital art like animation and concept art or traditional art like painting or acrylics. People are able to post job requests for artists on Buttermilk too.

Buttermilk was my first no-code project. I started conceptualising the idea around September and also used the time to play around and find the right tools to use. I got to work in October and launched the platform live at the end of the same month.

[The Problem] Why did I make it?

There was a gap in showcasing and finding local artists online because it’s either you find artists through referrals (i.e. someone you know or their friends referring to each other), exploring galleries or comic/art markets, or manually scourge through the internet to find them. I wanted a place where you can easily and quickly find local artists to your liking - be it to hire them for work — or to support them, but there wasn’t a medium like that that I know of in Malaysia. There are a lot of platforms used for showcasing your art, but they cover artists worldwide. So you’ll still need to manually find Malaysian artists from there.

[Tools used] How did I make it?

Webflow: There are many no-code tools that could have been easier but Webflow gave me more flexibility in design. However, building on Webflow has a pretty high learning curve, but their tutorials are honestly the best tutorials I’ve seen out there, so it helped a lot. When in doubt, you can reverse engineer the build by looking at other projects that were built on the Webflow Showcase page. Google Forms: In order for artists to join, all they need to do is fill in their details on a form, and I’ll go through each entry to review and approve the artists before adding them onto the directory. Airtable: I added two new forms — one for artists who wish to list their commissions and the other for job requests. Why Airtable? Because it allows them to upload images without depleting my Google Drive storage. At some point, I should also move the form from Google to Airtable too. Zapier: Instead of manually inputting the artist information from every form, I integrated Zapier into my Webflow CMS. So every time someone sends in their submission, their submission gets zapped automatically to the Webflow CMS instead. This works for both Google Forms and Airtable. That way, I can check and approve the submission directly on Webflow, instead of manually looking at them from the forms. Finsweet: I needed filters to filter different categories of the artists. I found and decided to use Finsweet's filters for Webflow because it's free. They have a Slack community too in case you might have more queries.

✨ Buttermilk got featured in a few places too! — Vulcan Post and The Star ✨