Graze

A sleek, safe, and user-friendly art sharing platform for all ages

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Graze

Inspiration

We were inspired by the theme 'Art' for this Hackathon to make a project that allows the user to host art pieces online. You can 'graze' for good artwork just like how you browse the internet. We believe that this is an important project to create because it's very important for people to be able to easily upload their art on the internet, without a system that creates dopamine such as 'likes' or 'comments'. Graze is meant to be a harmless solution to the problem that social media causes in this day and age. It allows users to share their projects and artwork with minimal toxicity and negative cognitive reactions, which allows people of all ages to enjoy Graze.

What it does

It allows the user to easily upload their artwork or manuscripts on the internet, free of charge. We made the user interface fairly simple to minimize confusion and time. This allows the user to easily submit their art and images online, and see other people's projects in the span of a few seconds. This project has a profound social impact as it diverts users off of traditional social media websites and applications, which are known to deplete cognitive ability, onto a friendlier and more accessible website that gets the job done without any negative effects. Such negative effects are specifically highlighted in a research study by Hasan Beyari of Al-Umm University of Saudi Arabia, and Sen-Chi Yu of National Taichung University, who say that "likes, comments, and followers were the biggest contributors to poor mental health (total utility = 56.24)". The full study can be found here. Graze is also very enjoyable to users, as shown by the positive user reviews (in the images).

How we built it

We built Graze with HTML, CSS, Flask, jQuery, Bootstrap, and Python. We built the frontend with HTML, CSS, and jQuery, and we built the backend with Flask, Python, and SQLAlchemy. We made our websites and user interfaces with hundreds of lines of HTML and CSS, and used JavaScript for easy user interactions that seemed flawless. We utilized Flask to handle uploads and authentications securely and efficiently. The Flask applications can be seen in our Python file app.py. We also used SQLAlchemy as our database.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many many challenges along the way (too many to remember). Some notable challenges include customizing colors for CSS, writing custom CSS while having Bootstrap, debugging Flask applications that didn't run, debugging HTML code that rendered incorrectly, and fixing the image sizes such that they were standardized and fixed. We ran into many issues with file names, folders, and directories that we had to fix and debug. We mainly ran into issues with our CSS, but managed to fix most of them. We also ran into issues with our database and authentication systems, but managed to fix them in time. We also had to deal with the fact that different people used different conventions for the same variables, so we had to figure out how to resolve communication issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made the website look beautiful and efficient. We spent many hours customizing the CSS and aligning the HTML so it would look perfect. We also were able to create a functional and efficient Flask system, along with a robust SQL database. We are also proud of our domain name, grazeart.xyz, and our custom branding and images.

What we learned

We learned how to work together as a team successfully. We also learned how to use source control to manage our production. Our frontend developers learned many aspects of HTML and CSS, such as aligning many items and coloring many items (which was very tedious). Our backend developer learned how to use Flask efficiently, and many aspects of making a website that is successfully running with Flask, such as containing images in the static folder instead of a images folder.

What's next for Graze

We plan to further expand the website's capabilities and functions. We also would like to host 'Graze' on a server that connects thousands of users by their shared love for the arts. We would like to one day develop Graze to the point where we can make money from sponsors and sell Graze to a large company, such as Facebook or Amazon.

Fun fact: Graze's logo is 3 uppercase versions of the Greek symbol 'Gamma' (Γ) to represent the 3 members of our developer team.

Note: There was an unexpected issue in the website that we were going to use to host our project so we ended up using localhost

Special thanks to Calum for recording our video and giving helpful insights throughout.

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