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Alex Zhang

AlexZhang

Alex Zhang

Product builder, artist, and entrepreneur

Scholastic Gold Key recipient · 2021, 2024

I work across product, technology, design, and growth to take ideas from concept to market.

Product workThe paintings

01 — Product work

Selected Work

All work
Museum Log collection screen listing saved artworksMuseum Log map view showing artworks pinned across EuropeMuseum Log deep dive screen featuring The Night Watch

01 · 2026 · Live on iOSLaunched

Museum Log

Art Scanner & Logbook

An iOS logbook for the art you see in person. Import museum photos, let the app identify each work, and keep the artist, title, museum and your own notes together in one collection. I took it from idea to App Store on my own: research, design, engineering, the AI recognition pipeline, launch, marketing and pricing.

Role
Founder, product designer & developer
Traction
~600-person waitlist, ~750K social views
Read the case study

Idea to market

  1. 01

    Idea

    Museum photos get lost in the camera roll.

  2. 02

    Research

    A ~40-person beta testing program.

  3. 03

    Design

    Import-first flow; logging stays automatic.

  4. 04

    Engineering

    React Native, Expo, Supabase, PostgreSQL.

  5. 05

    AI

    OCR, vision, retrieval and LLM verification.

  6. 06

    Launch

    Live on the App Store, August 2026.

  7. 07

    Marketing

    Art content on Instagram, ~750K views.

  8. 08

    Acquisition

    ~600-person waitlist built before launch.

  9. 09

    Monetization

    Annual and lifetime premium plans.

  10. 10

    Analytics

    Product analytics on what people actually use.

  11. 11

    Iteration

    Beta builds before the public release.

02 — Approach

I like taking ideas and making them real.

Across all of them: understanding people, making things well, and turning an idea into something other people can actually experience.

03 — Art

Paintings & Drawings

Full gallery

13 works in oil, acrylic and colored pencil, including two Scholastic Gold Keys. Painting is where I learned composition, color and patience with detail, and it shapes how everything else I make looks.

04 — Leadership

Illini Creative Impact

The full story

Transcending Barriers, acrylic on canvas. A painting about communities fitting together.

Founder & President · Since 2025Ongoing

Something I built beyond software: a student organization that gives artists at UIUC a way to build professional skills and get their work seen.

Students, first semester
50+Students, first semester
Competition entries
~80Competition entries
Exhibiting artists
20+Exhibiting artists
Founded it
From the idea and name to the website, Instagram and first members.
Built the team
Recruited officers and organized social media, tech and outreach sub-teams.
Ran the projects
A juried competition with partner campuses and a public exhibition with awards.
Found partners
Partnered with student organizations, recruited outside judges, and reached out to campus offices.

05 — Experience

Experience

Full background

  1. Jun 2026 – Present

    Museum Log

    Founder, Product Designer & Developer

    Designed, built and launched an iOS app that identifies museum artworks from photos and keeps them in a personal collection.

  2. Sep 2025 – May 2026

    Illinois Founders

    Community Team Member

    Champaign, IL

    Creative communications, branding and promotion for the student entrepreneurship community at UIUC.

  3. May 2025 – Jun 2025

    Kaide Quartz

    Data & Information Systems Intern

    Beijing, China

    Built internal machine-learning tools for pricing raw materials, and supported the accounting team with compliance work.

06 — Experiments

Experiments & Explorations

Prototypes and early ideas

  • 01

    Museum Games

    Casual games that use real paintings as their material: ArtCrush, an art-themed puzzle game, and Artdle, a daily guessing game.

    In developmentGames
  • 02

    SocratesGPT

    An experiment in AI that asks instead of answers: guided Socratic questioning that surfaces assumptions and helps you reason toward your own conclusion.

    ExplorationAI experiment
  • 03

    Claude Code Learning Companion

    A companion for beginners building with AI coding tools that explains the concepts, frameworks and decisions behind the code being written, inside the workflow.

    ExplorationDeveloper education

07 — Contact

Write to me.

alexzhang675@gmail.com

Early-stage teams, product and design roles, and anything to do with art.