Fresco

Fresco was a bootstrapped mobile product for recognizing, saving, and sharing artwork visits.

The core idea came from a simple museum behavior: people already take photos of art and look up information while they are in galleries, but those moments usually disappear into the camera roll.

Core Idea

Fresco turns those fleeting encounters into a structured personal archive with artwork identification, AI-enriched context, artist history, and social sharing.

The product philosophy was to support the museum visit without interrupting it. The app needed to make capture and lightweight learning faster, then preserve the emotional memory of the visit after it ended.

Product And Social Model

The social model was closer to Strava, Letterboxd, or Beli than a generic image feed. People log cultural activity as a way to express taste, remember experiences, and discover places through friends.

Artworks were grouped around visits instead of isolated posts. That made the system more useful as a journal and more socially legible as a record of cultural activity.

Capture And Recognition

The product centered on a quick capture flow: snap an artwork, identify it with AI, save it to a visit, and preserve context for later.

The recognition system used a hybrid direction: Google Vision, CLIP-style embeddings, and later wall-label extraction to improve matching. The product model also allowed provisional identity so the user could still save a meaningful visit even when matching was imperfect.

Engineering System

I built the system across Expo, React Native, Next.js, Supabase, Prisma, Turborepo, and shared Zod schemas.

The mobile client used typed endpoint modules, React Query for optimistic UI and cache invalidation, Expo Router for navigation, and local-first interaction patterns to keep capture feeling immediate.

Outcome

Fresco became a strong proof of end-to-end product building: research, product strategy, mobile UX, AI recognition, database modeling, backend workflow, and interface implementation in one system.