Platforms like Sketchfab, CGTrader, and TurboSquid have served the global 3D community for years. But if you are an animator, game developer, or architect in Africa trying to source culturally accurate 3D assets, traditional compounds, Kente patterns, Ghanaian market scenes, you are mostly out of luck. What exists is either wrong, generic, or made by outsiders.
The Digital Character Creation project exposed this gap directly. Those characters needed a home. A dedicated distribution platform built for African assets, by someone who understands what African creators actually need, does not exist yet. This project is the design work to build that platform.
The African Assets Platform is a curated digital marketplace for 3D models, textures, HDRIs, and reference packs rooted in African contexts. Anyone can browse and download. Verified creators can upload and sell. The character library from the Digital Character Creation project is the first content seed that launches the catalogue.
Before wireframes, the work started with conversations. Five informal interviews with 3D artists and animation students at KNUST, three with independent game developers in Accra. The questions were simple: where do you get assets today, what frustrates you about it, and what would make you switch.
Two things came up in every single conversation. First, trust: artists want to know an asset will work in their pipeline before they pay for it. A static thumbnail is not enough. Second, licence clarity: the ambiguity of "free for commercial use" on international sites has burned people before. They want a simple, readable licence card — not a legal document.
What the research consistently surfaced, distilled into four design requirements.
The information architecture came before any visual decisions. Three primary user flows were mapped: browsing and downloading, creator upload and publishing, and account and library management. The IA kept each flow under five steps from entry to completion.
Wireframes stayed deliberately low-fidelity for the first two rounds — black-and-white, no colour, no icons. This forced decisions about layout and hierarchy to happen before aesthetic preferences could creep in and cloud the structural thinking.
The visual language pulls from two directions: the dark, focused UI conventions of professional creative tools (think Figma, Blender, Substance), and the warmth and richness of West African visual culture expressed through the accent palette and typography choices. The result is a platform that feels native to creative workflows, not like a generic e-commerce store.
A consistent design system was built in Figma from the second round of hi-fi screens onwards. Every repeating element — asset cards, filter pills, licence badges, upload steps — was turned into a component with documented variants and states. This keeps the design scalable as new pages and features are added without visual drift.
What the Figma design system covers.
The Figma prototype below covers the core user journey: landing on the platform, browsing by category, opening an asset detail page, and completing a download. Replace the embed URL below with the live Figma share link when ready to publish.
The design phase covers the full browsing, purchase, and creator experience across desktop and mobile. What comes next is the technical build — database schema, asset upload pipeline, CDN and storage strategy, and the payment integration for African markets (which has its own complexity: not everyone uses Stripe).
The Digital Character Creation library feeds directly into this platform as the first verified catalogue. The two projects are designed together: the characters prove the asset production pipeline works, and the platform gives those assets a permanent, scalable home. The goal is to build infrastructure that African digital creators can rely on for the next decade.