A Storied Past, a Powerful Present, and a Bright Future
Obsidian Collection Archives
Sharing a wealth of African American images with the world.
Honoring and preserving a rich legacy by building “the modern Griot of Black stories” is the central goal of the Obsidian Collection Archives. Providing access to a massive repository of African American material of historical, artistic, and cultural significance, the Chicago-based nonprofit offers an incredibly valuable resource to journalists, content creators, media outlets, and archivists who seek to better understand, represent, and share the narratives of Black community – past, present, and future.
Obsidian Collection’s challenge to us: quickly design and develop an online marketplace that would serve as a connection between information and image creators and those who might want to use and share them, and be sure to enable users to search, upload, and license image assets seamlessly and efficiently.
Our team delivered a Ruby on Rails platform in about 20 weeks, including the ability to upload tens of thousands of images at once, search the full library, and complete a license purchase.
Picture a perfect solution.
In only 20 weeks, we delivered a screen-reader friendly, keyboard-navigable web platform that not only hit on all aspects of the up-front challenge, but set Obsidian Collection up for more efficient implementation of ongoing improvements over time. Incorporating all aspects of the Collection’s brand standards, the platform’s effectiveness as a research and sharing tool is second to none, and its innovative payment flow structure helps funnel the majority of licensing fees directly to artists and photographers through flexible image licensing agreements.
8th Light’s team designed and developed a full-featured website and two-sided ecommerce platform that enables users to upload tens of thousands of images at once, search the full library, and complete a license purchase for reusing images elsewhere.
The platform helps funnel the majority of licensing fees directly to artists and photographers through flexible image licensing agreements.
We’re very pleased with the software and app product created by 8th Light. The collaborative process was essential to communicating our goals and learning what was indeed possible. I’m thrilled we now have a platform that can grow and expand into the future.
Angela Ford
Founder and Executive Director
The Obsidian Collection Archives
Services
DESIGN
- Human-centered Design
- Information Architecture
- UI Design
- UI Engineering
- UX Design
- UX Research
- Web Accessibility
DEVELOPMENT
- API Development
- Application Architecture
- Ecommerce Platform Development
- Software Development
- Third-party Integrations
DATA
- Data Architecture
DEVOPS
- Cloud Infrastructure and Migration
- Infrastructure Engineering
- Solution Architecture
- System Architecture
- Test Automation
Technologies
- AWS
- AWS EC2
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- CircleCI
- CloudFormation
- Docker
- Elasticsearch
- GitHub Actionsz
- Google Analytics
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google Tag Manager
- JavaScript
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- Spring
- Stripe
Let’s collaborate.
