Historik
History rediscovered.
A two-sided platform that placed people in history, where it occurred. Museums published their stories on a web platform, and anyone with the app could find them on the ground where they happened. I founded the company, ran it as CEO, and was its only designer.
- Role: Founder & sole designer
- Years: 2021–2025
- Team: Seven
- Raised: $150K
49%
App Store conversion, zero marketing
$150K
Seed capital raised
The only designer, and the CEO.
I designed the whole product while running the company around it.
The designer
The brand, the design system, the platform, the app, and the prototypes. The entire product surface was mine to design, alongside a small engineering team who built it.
The CEO
Pitch decks, the cap table and financial models, the data room, investor updates, and pitching the investors and VCs I was raising the next round from.
History was passing by at 60 miles an hour.
On a road trip through southern Idaho in 2011, I kept craning my neck at history signs I couldn't read in time. When I did stop, I found weathered signs, missing plaques, or nothing at all.
Roadside history markers. Every community tells its history a different way.
Historik was two products pointed at each other, and the two sides wanted opposite things.
The institution
Museum staff and volunteers, often retired, often new to digital tools. Their instinct was to archive on paper, not publish online. They needed an authoring tool powerful enough for rich multimedia stories, and simple enough to use without help.
The explorer
History fans, young and old, who would leave anything that felt like a museum database. They needed discovery that felt personal, close by, and a little like a game.
One platform, two audiences
One platform and one design language, for two audiences with nothing in common. That tension drove every decision I made.
I started on graph paper.
Pens, pencils, and markers came before the computer. I wanted to work out the flow without color, type, or other visuals getting in the way.
01
Mind maps
What keeps history interesting wherever you are? I reworked the app's mind maps several times before I was happy with them.
02
User flows
Every path mapped out before any screen: exploring the map, filtering, settings, and Hidden History.
03
Interviews
Several dozen potential app users and real historical institutions reviewed early alpha designs. They told us how it should behave, what order made sense, and what was missing.
Wireframes to a high-fidelity prototype in 30 days.
I used the prototype to show potential investors the vision. By December 2021, the prototype and the business model helped Historik raise $150,000.
One database, multiple products.
That's how I explained Historik to people. As the only designer, I had no path to four products without a system underneath them, and I built it in Figma before the screens: type, a full semantic color set, components, even the map-pin language.
A seven-person company shipped four coordinated products in twelve months.
The system is how. It grew with the company, a new type style here, a new tint there, a new component when a product needed one.
A typeface drawn from scratch
I wanted the mark to honor the past and still feel current. I drew the typeface from scratch to make it Historik’s own. The O carries the stars of the first American flag, and the bar beneath it carries the stripes. The colors are muted to feel traditional.
Navy
#1E3F5C
The stars in the O.
Red
#B11F24
The stripe beneath it.
Charcoal
#2C2C2C
The wordmark.
Light Gray
#EEF0F1
The field behind the app icon.
An authoring tool a volunteer could use alone.
The platform was the heart of Historik. Institutions built their stories in it, and every product drew from it. It had to give a thousand-foot view of any story and still let someone fix a single detail.
6
Institutions signed up and creating stories in the platform’s first month.
Built with Jake Jones (database architecture, backend, API, and strategy), Peyton Critchfield (backend and project management), and Andre Clark (software engineering).
Every story has a type
Every story is an Area, Location, Person, Event, or Artifact, and each has a category inside it. In the platform, picking the type is step one. In the app, the same five types are the interests people choose. The taxonomy organizes the whole platform and drives discovery on the consumer side.
“Each piece of history has a type and category. Choosing the correct ones ensures people can find them if it fits their interests.”The guide beside step one
A wizard, not a manual
Creating a story runs through five steps. Each step pairs the form with a short guide in plain words: If the shoe fits. Add some visual magic. Connect stories together. A retired volunteer could publish a complete story without a manual.
Step 02 · Story information
Step 03 · Image selection
Step 04 · Related stories
Two pins on every photo
Each image records the year it was taken, a description, tags, and its source. It can also carry two points on the map: where its subject stands, and where the photographer stood. Those two points are exactly what Hidden History needs.
Built for trust
Every story carries an editorial state: Draft, Review Request, In Progress, Published, Verified. Before anything goes live, a review shows exactly what changed, and any change can be discarded. Institutions are custodians of the record. The tooling had to respect that.
Ready for what came next
Each institution got its own profile: its location, the area it covers, its hours, and its own story, to help draw people to the museum itself. The platform also had room for 3D models, QR codes for marketing, and Hidden History.
The app
The portal to the past.
The app is where people met history. It had to feel personal, let people tune it to what they love, and carry technology nobody else in the space was using.
Personal from the first screen
Home greets you by name, with recommended history, what you viewed recently, and your bookmarks. People choose their interests down to categories like Railroads, Saloons, and Theaters, and the map and notifications follow their picks.
Find it nearby
Zoomed out, stories gather into counts. Zoomed in, every pin shows its category, and the nearest story slides up with its distance. Search results show the distance too.
01 · Zoomed out
02 · Zoomed in
03 · Search
Every story shows its source
Credibility had to live in the interface, not in a claim around it. Every story carries its citations and source credits, and verified stories wear a badge.
Where and when
The year it was established and how far away it is.
Historik Verified
A badge for stories that passed review, and a flag for whether the place still exists.
The story and fun facts
A short read first, with the full story one tap away.
Related stories and links
The connections the author made in the platform.
Source credit
Every story names where it came from, like the Museum of North Idaho.
Plot route, audio, and AR
Walk there, listen to it, or place it in augmented reality.
A reason to come back
Badges, points, and stats for cities explored, stories explored, and hidden history discovered. Bookmarks sort by distance, nearest first, and a swipe removes one.
Built with Johan Walhout and Jignesh Patel (Flutter), Peyton Critchfield (backend), and Jake Jones (database).
Augmented reality
Putting history back where it stood.
Three AR experiences shipped in the beta, including a 3D Wilma Theater standing on the floor in front of you. The upload path was built into the platform, and institutions could publish their own.
Safety first
Then place it
A theater that no longer exists, standing on a sidewalk.
Phase one · Shipped
Institutions upload a scaled 3D model to a story. In the app, anyone with the story can place the model in augmented reality through their phone.
Phase two · Planned
Place the model at its original location with 3D positioning tools. History could stand where it stood, even where the building is gone.
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Four products in twelve months.
In 12 months we rallied a team of talented engineers and designed, built, and deployed four products. Historik would have been impossible without that team.
$150K
Seed capital, raised with the prototype and the business model.
4
Products shipped in 12 months by a team of seven.
6
Institutions building stories in the platform's first month.
49%
App Store conversion in the first six months, with zero marketing.
3
AR experiences shipped in the beta.
11
Institutions in 8 cities onboarded over the life of the platform.
The app worked. The business didn’t.
People who found the app used it and came back, averaging 3.16 sessions per device. The museums paying for the platform had small budgets, older volunteer teams, and little room to bet on a new vendor. In 2022, investors pulled back from early-stage startups without revenue.
We stretched a six-month runway across two years. In March 2025, Historik’s assets moved to the Museum of North Idaho, the first museum to open its doors to us. The work continues there.
I built something real, ran it as far as it would go, and made the call when it needed to be made.
- Team
- Jake Jones, CTO: database architecture, backend, and API. Peyton Critchfield, software engineering and scrum. Andre Clark, software engineering. Johan Walhout and Jignesh Patel, Flutter development.
- My role
- Founder and CEO. Brand, product design, UX, design system, rapid prototyping, iconography, web design, wireframes, mind maps, and content writing.
- Tools
- Figma, Jira, Confluence, Lucidchart, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop.
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