NextHavn
The creative industry's next operating system
NextHavn is an active product still in development. This is a condensed look at the thinking and design decisions that have gone into this project rather than a full process breakdown.
Talent, studios and gear in one borderless platform is what NextHavn promises. A unified ecosystem for the creative industry and beyond built to eliminate the fragmented nature of modern creative work where job leads are buried in social media DMs, studio availability is hidden and gear relies on personal networks.
ROLE
I led the design of NextHavn's web presence and the foundational experience for its incoming web app turning a broad, multi-sided platform vision into concrete interface and interaction decisions.
Working across the marketing site and product surfaces, I shaped how the ecosystem's many parts such as talent discovery, studio booking, gear rental, payments and community could be made legible and navigable within a single coherent experience.
Alongside the design work, I created and ran a recruitment survey to bring real creatives into the research process, using it to source participants and gather early signal on the product's viability. The survey doubled as a validation tool, surfacing how creatives actually source work, book spaces, and manage gear.
CORE PILLARS AND FUNCTIONALITY
The platform is designed to support the full arc of a production, from pre-production sourcing through post-production delivery. The three pillars anchor this workflow are:
Verified Creative Network: A global, vetted database of photographers, videographers, editors, crew, and digital artists. Every profile is fully searchable and filterable — by specific skill set, location, daily or hourly rate and real-time calendar availability making hiring shift from guesswork and referrals to deliberate, informed selections.
On-Demand Bookings: A direct-to-studio marketplace where users can browse, compare, and instantly reserve photography, film, and audio recording spaces. Transparent pricing and automated calendar management remove the back-and-forth that normally sits between needing a space and securing one.
Equipment Marketplace: An upcoming portal built to make professional-grade production gear — cameras, drone rigs, lighting setups accessible anywhere in the world. Standardized rental contracts, verified availability and fixed liability structures bring predictability to a process that has long run on informal trust.
WHY THE ECOSYSTEM MATTERS
Today, producing a single project can mean stitching together messaging apps, invoicing tools, portfolio hosts, and a patchwork of regional rental agencies. NextHavn collapses that fragmentation into one operating system for creative work. It gives independent artists genuine local visibility while allowing global brands to drop a production anywhere in the world and safely assemble an entire localized team — turning what used to be a logistical nightmare into a single, coherent process.