Arcual – Art Market Backoffice Redesign

Arcual case study — Rebuilt the enterprise SaaS backoffice UI on a custom, scalable Vue component library

Client:

Arcual

Date:

2023-09 – 2023-12

Duration:

4 months
Arcual – Art Market Backoffice Redesign
I rebuilt the interface of the Arcual backoffice platform, the internal system galleries and art institutions use to run sales and operations. I worked on the frontend only, with custom components instead of a generic admin template.
Arcual backoffice overview — Operations overview for the art market teamArcual records table — Custom tables for artworks, contracts and payouts

About the client

Arcual builds the digital infrastructure behind the primary art market. Galleries, artists and institutions use it to handle sales, contracts and the relationships between them, with a record of who did what.

Project Overview

Arcual’s backoffice is where the commercial side of the platform actually runs: sales records, operational workflows, the data everything else depends on. It had grown into a generic admin layout that no longer matched what galleries needed to do inside it.I worked on the frontend of the redesign. The core decision was to stop reaching for off-the-shelf layout patterns and build the components the product actually needed, which meant working out where each component’s boundaries should sit before writing any of them.Tailwind CSS handles the styling layer, so visual changes stay in the markup instead of piling up in a stylesheet nobody wants to touch.The point of all this was maintainability. The product team keeps shipping new backoffice screens, and they now assemble them from components that already exist.

The Challenge

The app was already in production and the team was still shipping to it. New components had to slot into workflows and business logic that were already there and already working, which rules out the clean-slate version of this job.That constraint decides most of the architecture. Every component boundary had to be drawn where the existing code would tolerate it, not where a greenfield design would have put it.

My Contribution

I built the custom components for the backoffice interface and reworked the frontend structure underneath them.Most of the work was turning design decisions into patterns that could be reused instead of one-off screens. That meant a lot of back-and-forth with the product and design teams about which parts of a proposed layout were genuinely specific to that screen and which were a component waiting to be extracted.I used Tailwind CSS throughout, with maintainability as the thing being optimised for. This is a product that will still be here in five years.

Technology Stack

  • Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, custom component architecture, frontend-only contribution, enterprise SaaS backoffice systems, art technology platforms
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