Joopiter Digital Auction House Website Redesign
JOOPITER — Son of a Pharaoh is a debut auction from Pharrell Williams that reframes collecting around culture, provenance, and story. My redesign treats the auction as an editorial experience first and a transactional interface second: visitors can move from a cinematic landing page into the SoHo exhibition, understand JOOPITER’s provenance as a platform, and explore hero lots with clear estimate and provenance details.
The site is organized into two main tracks: Discover (Home, Exhibition, Provenance) and Auctions (Jewelry, Luggage, Accessories). A five-step timeline shows how Pharrell’s personal archive became a 52-lot digital sale, while “Curated Lots” and “Explore the auction landscape” highlight three anchor pieces: the Jacob & Co. N.E.R.D. pendant, a Louis Vuitton Multicolor Monogram trunk, and a Casio G-Shock × Bape DW-6900. Throughout the experience, editorial cards, icon grids, and galleries explain why each artifact matters and how to bid with confidence.
Challenge
The original JOOPITER story sits at the intersection of fashion, music, and contemporary art, but auction interfaces often prioritize dense tables of estimates and legal language over cultural context. For a debut sale like Son of a Pharaoh, that disconnect can make first-time bidders feel shut out: the narrative of Pharrell’s archive, the SoHo preview, and the role of Black Ambition risks getting buried under lot numbers and price ranges.
My challenge was to design a digital auction house that feels like an editorial feature: one that:
Explains how JOOPITER came out of Pharrell’s personal archive and why proceeds support Black Ambition.
Shows the path from archive to exhibition to online bidding in a way that makes sense if you’ve never attended an auction before.
Gives each hero lot enough space for story, provenance, and specs without overwhelming the page.
Results
Clear two-track navigation. Split the site into Discover (Home, Exhibition, Provenance) and Auctions (Jewelry, Luggage, Accessories) so visitors can either learn the story or jump straight to bidding flows.
Five-step timeline from archive to auction. Illustrated the journey from Pharrell’s 2020 archive inventory through the SoHo preview and debut sale, culminating in a $5.25M auction with proceeds to Black Ambition.
Three curated hero lots with deep storytelling. Designed detailed lot layouts for the N.E.R.D. pendant, LV Multicolor trunk, and Casio G-Shock × Bape, each with narrative description, estimate range, and provenance field to ground value in context.
Exhibition and provenance pages that behave like editorial features. The Exhibition page explains the SoHo preview and introduces four key principles—culture over category, transparent bidding, hybrid preview model, and editorial-led listings. The Provenance page layers critical acclaim, industry recognition, global perspective, and a second timeline to show how JOOPITER operates as a platform.
Collector education built into the UI. A dedicated “Auction insights for collectors” section walks through estimates, reserve prices, bidding steps, and buyer’s premiums, reducing the need for external how-to guides.
7
Pages
20
Insight Modules
3
Curated Hero Lots
Process
Mapped the Son of a Pharaoh story. Broke the real-world narrative into phases: Pharrell’s archive, the creation of JOOPITER, the SoHo exhibition, the online sale, and the Black Ambition partnership. This became the backbone of the “From Archive to Auction” timeline and the provenance journey.
Redesigned the information architecture. Defined top-level nav buckets for Discover vs Auctions and then nested specific pages (Exhibition, Provenance, Auctions index, individual lots) under those, so each piece of content has a clear home.
Designed editorial modules for each page type.
Home: hero banner, curated lots strip, five-step timeline, and “Behind the Artifacts” cards linking into Exhibition and Provenance.
Exhibition: hero copy, principles grid, and gallery that reads like a museum recap.
Provenance: hero block about JOOPITER’s origin, three recognition cards, a second timeline, collector insights, and a backstory CTA.
Auctions: lot overview layout with shared patterns for description, estimate range, provenance, and “View piece” CTAs.
Built reusable lot-detail templates. Used components so each lot page (N.E.R.D. pendant, LV trunk, G-Shock) shares the same structure—hero image, key facts, gallery, long-form story, technical/spec cards, and “More from the collection” recommendations (from your Figma frames), making it easy to scale to additional pieces.
Prototyped in Framer. Implemented the nav groups, hover states on cards, smooth scroll between sections, and consistent footer links so the experience feels like a working auction site rather than static mockups.
Conclusion
The JOOPITER redesign was about more than polishing an auction layout; it was about showing how a digital auction house can behave like a cultural publication. By structuring Son of a Pharaoh around timelines, exhibition context, and clear collector education, I created a site where value is grounded in story and provenance, not just price ranges.
Working across IA, narrative copy, and component-based layouts taught me how to translate an artist-driven brand into a product that still meets the practical needs of bidders. The result is a digital auction experience that feels editorial, legible, and ready to scale for future JOOPITER sales.