Changing how Collections are Displayed
In the past week, there have been many changes to how projects are displayed on Artblocks.io and OpenSea. While transitions always take some adjusting, we hope this will ultimately be a better user experience for collectors, give artists more exposure, and help new community members navigate to verified collections easier.
I’ll run through some basics of the new layouts below, and that’ll hopefully help next time you’re on the hunt for your next piece.
On Art Blocks
We rolled out a new site! And while we know there is still work to be done, we are happy the community has largely enjoyed the new experience. But, before I jump into the new site, we kindly ask you to report any bugs, features, or design requests here: https://notionforms.io/forms/art-blocks-website-v2-beta-launch-feedback. Filling out that form will ensure it’s on the dev team’s radar and can be put in queue to be addressed.
One element we wanted to preserve was a minimal and clean aesthetic. We didn’t want to create a flashy site that distracted from the art, so when you get to the home page, you’ll be greeted with a random project. Only instead of showing one output like the old site, you can click and drag to scroll through the different outputs.
The default view shows Curated projects only if you head over to the ‘projects’ section on the new site. You’ll need to select ‘all projects’ for the complete project list. You’ll again see the same single-project side-scroll if you want to explore projects directly on this page.
If you want to see a project page, click the project or artist name.
Once you’re on the project page, it should look fairly familiar with one big upgrade — infinite scroll! No more clicking through 50+ pages to see a full collection. And under every image, there will be links to the details page, image, and live view. The detail page includes the project description, license info, the mint price for the specific piece, and the piece’s feature details. There are also links to the piece on OpenSea and Etherscan.
Another major upgrade to the website is the artist page. If you click ‘artists’ at the top, you’ll be able to scroll through all the artists that have released a project on Art Blocks and see all their projects.
We hope the website is intuitive to navigate, but if you’re having any trouble, please reach out to the team in the Discord channel #dev-feedback and the notion form linked above (https://notionforms.io/forms/art-blocks-website-v2-beta-launch-feedback).
On OpenSea
So, OpenSea has started change how Art Blocks projects are displayed, and holy hell, this is great! Here is the original announcement:
The Art Blocks team has asked for some changes on the OS UI, and we are very excited to see them being implemented. At the time of writing this, we are still in the middle of everything being migrated over, but once it’s complete, it should make using OpenSea for Art Blocks secondary much easier (and easier to find the verified collections!). Here is a snapshot of https://opensea.io/collection/art-blocks-playground:
As you can see, Art Blocks Playground itself isn’t a verified collection. The artists’ projects are verified!!! You can scroll through all the verified collections and find the exact project. And better yet, the search bar is useable for Art Blocks projects! (As you can tell by my excessive use of exclamations marks, I’m very excited!)
Once you find a project you’re interested in and navigate to the verified artist project, you’ll be able to filter properties by that specific project’s features.
And the good news isn’t over! Before this change, the properties were unusable on OpenSea because it pooled all features across collections, so instead of seeing an accurate percentage of features from one collection, OpenSea calculated a features percentage against all curate/playground/factory projects. But now, Properties are tied only to the correct project!
Again, OpenSea is in the middle of implementing all these changes, and I believe they need to finish working on Factory projects, which may take a while, but this is a significant change! Thank you, OpenSea!!!
We are Always Learning
These are just a few things we’ve been working on, but we are by no means close to finished. Art Blocks is constantly listening to the community and finding ways to make it easier to collect beautiful generative art.
If you have any more suggestions, I highly urge you to submit a ticket to our dev team, jump in Discord and make suggestions in #dev-feedback, or reach out to me directly and I’ll relay the message.