The digital platform where architecture, art, and creative culture converge.

icodelabs built a two-sided marketplace with distinct roles for artists and managers. Artists create profiles listing their services, creative disciplines, and availability — presenting their work through portfolio galleries and project showcases. Managers and studios browse the marketplace, discover artists aligned with their creative direction, and initiate professional engagements through a structured inquiry flow.

The transaction process was built as an inquiry-first model — appropriate for the creative services context where engagements are rarely transactional and almost always require a conversation before commitment. Managers send structured inquiries to artists, artists respond with proposals or availability confirmation, and the engagement progresses through a managed conversation flow before any financial commitment is made. This mirrors how creative professional relationships actually begin in the architecture and art world.

A fully custom JWT authentication system was built supporting two distinct user roles — artists and managers — each with their own registration flow, profile structure, dashboard, and platform permissions. Role-based access control governs what each user type can see and do across the marketplace, ensuring artists manage their service listings and incoming inquiries while managers control their talent discovery, saved profiles, and active engagements.

A Stripe-powered subscription system was built governing marketplace access tiers for artists and managers. Subscription plans control feature access, listing visibility, and inquiry volume — creating a recurring revenue model for the platform operator while giving serious creative professionals a clear path to premium marketplace presence.

Strapi was integrated as the headless CMS powering Direzione's editorial content layer — architecture features, design showcases, artist interviews, visual essays, and cultural commentary. Content editors publish and manage editorial pieces through Strapi's admin interface, with Next.js fetching content at build time or on-demand for fast, SEO-optimised page delivery. The editorial layer gives Direzione cultural authority in the creative world — positioning the marketplace as a destination, not just a directory.

Cloudinary handles all media management across the platform — artist portfolio imagery, editorial photography, project gallery assets, and video content. Automatic format optimisation, responsive image delivery, and transformation pipelines ensure that high-resolution creative work is presented at publication quality without compromising page performance. For a platform where visual presentation is the primary trust signal, Cloudinary's media infrastructure is foundational.

Next.js was chosen to serve both the editorial and marketplace layers from a single codebase — with server-side rendering for dynamic marketplace pages (artist profiles, search results, inquiry flows) and static site generation for editorial content where SEO and load performance are critical. This hybrid rendering approach means editorial pages rank and load like a publication while marketplace interactions feel like a live application.

Full bilingual support was implemented across all platform surfaces — marketplace listings, editorial content, authentication flows, and user dashboards — in both English and Italian. Given the platform's Italian creative heritage and international audience ambitions, bilingual delivery was built into the platform architecture from the ground up rather than retrofitted.

The full platform is hosted on AWS — providing the scalability, reliability, and media delivery performance that a high-visual-fidelity creative platform demands. AWS infrastructure supports both the Next.js application layer and the Strapi CMS backend with appropriate environment separation for development, staging, and production.