About Designcollector

Designcollector

Designcollector was established in April 2003 by Arseny Vesnin (Saint-Petersburg) as a daily writing focused on creativity online. It quickly became a leading online media outlet that keeps an eye on the rapidly changing world of new media art, design, and other creative disciplines.
During the first decade, Designcollector gained massive respect from designers and studios as a platform leading the opinion on current creative trends. By that time, it set a partnership with most of the leading resources, writing critical reviews on web artists and disciplines.
Designcollector was the first official partner of Behance Network, and Arseny became one of the first Behance Ambassadors in 2010. Over the next two years, Designcollector organised several offline events, “Behance Meetups,” in St.Petersburg and Moscow, leading the largest community of artists on that platform.
With the support of numerous illustrators at the time, Arseny gathered the confidence to release two distinct catalogues, “Russian Illustration WOW," which can be found on Amazon.

Starting in 2008, Designcollector established a life-changing media partnership with the most significant event of creativity - the OFFF Festival. Later, Arseny was invited to speak at the OFFF 2011 festival, which started a chain reaction of further speaker experience, sharing opinions on Russian-speaking media, design and art culture. These extended to talks during conferences and festivals like Filmteractive (PL), Digitized (GR) and Trimarchi (AR).

Digital Decade

In 2013, fueled by the fantastic backing of artists, online media, and the OFFF festival, Arseny chose to expand Designcollector and set up a new digital art curation platform. “Digital Decade” debuted as a collaborative annual contest where the digital artist’s submissions, chosen by a prominent jury, were exhibited during Barcelona’s festival OFFF.

After a few successful years as a pop-up exhibition at OFFF festivals, Digital Decade evolved into an independent event that connects creators and partners for annual shows. Since then, Arseny has curated the works of over 150 pioneering, exploratory, and celebrated artists operating at the intersection of the physical and digital realms. Additionally, he has established partnerships with organisations such as OFFF, Ello US, FutureFest UK, and Creative Debuts UK. These collaborations facilitated the organisation of two consecutive exhibitions in London: “There is No Planet B” at Underdog Gallery in 2016 and “Cyberia” at UglyDucks in 2017. These exhibitions received significant attention and played a crucial role in the successful careers of the artists featured in the curated shows.

In 2020, Arseny collaborated with Sedition Art Platform UK to present a Special Edition of Digital Decade. For this iteration, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, artists have creative, speculative and critical comments on how phygital life may change post-pandemic. The artists are participating in present works in various media, including photography, audiovisual collaborations, 3D digital sculptures and animation.

Arseny’s extensive background in critical art and design analysis enables him to swiftly grasp trends and redirect Designcollector as a leading platform for artist recommendations. Designcollector assists dedicated curators, gallery representatives, and art institutions in showcasing chosen artists, their latest activities, and events to the worldwide audience.

Since then, phygital and onscreen art have flourished in the fast-paced environment of the digital and crypto art scene. Arseny has become a vocal part of the world NFT Community, started by curating and promoting artists through the leading platform Superrare and their editorials.

In 2022, Designcollector teamed up again with a long-time partner, OFFF Festival, to curate several artists on their new platform, OUCHE. Together with the event organised, Arseny curated two artists to join the online and offline exhibitions in Barcelona.

Main Partners

OFFF Festival, Behance, ELLO, Creative Debuts, Curioos, Depositphotos, FITC, TOCA ME, Sedition, Trimarchi, Superare and more