Raisonne
Product lead on a catalogue raisonné CMS for on-chain art — and the open-source platform it is becoming.
- Client
- Own product, orkhan.art
- Role
- Product leadDesign directionPrototyping
- Year
- 2025 to 2026
- Discipline
- Product DesignWebPrototypingDesign Systems
An artist with more than four thousand works starts without a system of record. The works sit on Ethereum, Base, Bitcoin Ordinals and several marketplaces, each with its own idea of what a collection is. Exhibitions, press and provenance live in files. Nothing agrees on what counts as one work, and nothing can say, from the chain alone, which of those contracts the artist made rather than merely holds. A studio archive has to answer both questions: what exists, and whose it is.
One system of record for a practice spread across several chains and marketplaces, holding both the archive and the evidence behind it.
1. One catalogue model that reads as a grid, a gallery, a table, a series page, a CV and a press index. 2. Owned infrastructure: one server, one CMS, and the artwork media pinned on a self-hosted IPFS node that several of the series now resolve through on-chain. 3. An import that reads wallets and returns the series they created, with the evidence for each one shown before anything is saved.
The catalogue
The public reading surface. Every series, work, edition and chain fact comes out of one CMS, so the same record can be read as an index, a gallery or a table.
The archive
The same records do more than one job. Series pages, the exhibition history, the press index and the collector-facing analytics are all readings of the catalogue, not separate content.
Proving who made it
The hard part is not finding contracts. It is separating what a wallet created from what it merely holds. An early run confirmed a look-alike on Base, so control alone stopped counting as authorship.
The open default
The same catalogue in a standard shadcn theme, the default an install would ship with. The design orkhan.art runs stays private. The open default is not released yet.
The how-to
The open install carries its own documentation. Not marketing copy — the artist’s workbench: how visitors move through the catalogue, how series and works are modelled, how import turns wallets into attributed series, where the fixture files live, and every route and environment variable from A to Z. Gated with the other tools behind RAISONNE_TOOLS so a public host is not advertising a workbench by default.
Import, series, and every feature, written into the product
Summary
Built from 2025 and running today on one server: Payload CMS, a Next.js front end, an analytics service and a self-hosted IPFS node. The direction, and the product and preservation calls, are the artist's own. Catalogue counts read live on 19 September 2026.
