Case study

Digital Art Store

A live catalog and checkout — not a folder of files. Fourteen collections, dual 4K crops, one cart, and a commercial licence that says what you may not do.

Role: Store designer & producer 2025–2026 · Solo · self-initiated

Problem

A Drive folder of gothic stills is not a store. The $1–$6 wallpaper market is flooded with raw model dumps. A recruiter or a buyer who lands on a grid of untitled JPEGs has no reason to pay, and no way to know what they are allowed to do with the file.

The Glace Noire case study is the brand. This page is the commerce system: how the catalog is SKU’d, how a buyer inspects a collection before Payhip, and why the money is in the written commercial archive rather than another cheap pack.

Role

I designed the catalog, the collection pages, the personal-versus-commercial split, and the checkout path. I wrote the Standard Commercial Licence, kept one Payhip cart on gianniperugini.com, and sent brand traffic from glacenoire.com/art to that cart instead of standing up a second store.

Process

  1. SKU the world, not the file Fourteen named collections, twelve stills each — 168 works. Every still ships as a 4K desktop file and a mobile crop, 336 files. A buyer purchases a collection format (mobile $4, desktop $4, both $6) or the complete archive. Untitled singles would have looked like stock.
  2. Let the buyer inspect before Payhip Each collection has a permanent page with watermarked desktop and mobile previews. The free sample is a real Payhip download. Nobody is asked to pay for a mood they cannot see.
  3. Price the scarce thing Personal wallpaper packs stay cheap because that market is a commodity. The complete personal archive starts at $19. The offer that is not interchangeable is the $79+ complete archive under the Standard Commercial Licence.
  4. One cart, written exclusions Checkout stays on gianniperugini.com through Payhip. The licence permits websites, social, ads, and flattened client work. It excludes resale, merch, print-on-demand, book and album covers, logos, trademarks, NFTs, and AI training.

What is published

Only URLs a recruiter can open today. Revenue is not estimated.

  1. archive.html — Digital Art Store: featured collections, other collections, personal and commercial archives.
  2. Payhip free sample — a real download, not a screenshot of one.
  3. commercial-licence.html — Standard Commercial Licence, including what is not permitted.
  4. licensing.html — plain-language personal versus commercial comparison.
  5. faq.html — formats, delivery, and preview policy before checkout.
  6. Glace Noire case study — the brand this catalog belongs to. Not repeated here.

What is not claimed

No sales figures, conversion rates, or follower counts. No client merch, no second cart on glacenoire.com, and no unbacked agency retainers. Photography on this site is photographed work and is not sold as a Glace Noire collection.

Catalog stills

Four files from live collections. These are store artworks, not mood-board extras.

Burned Canvas — Ember Crack, a textured burned painting with ember fissures
Burned Canvas — Ember Crack. The still used on the Portfolio store card.
Stone Sanctuary — Crypt Stairs, a gothic stone stairwell with a single shaft of top light
Stone Sanctuary — Crypt Stairs. One collection page, desktop and mobile crops.
Midnight Masquerade — Portrait Veil, a high-contrast gothic portrait behind a veil
Midnight Masquerade — Portrait Veil. Theatrical gothic, sold as a named series.
Urban Noir — Rain Reflections, wet pavement and amber streetlight at night
Urban Noir — Rain Reflections. The night language of the series, as a still in the catalog.

Decisions worth defending

  1. Checkout was not cloned onto glacenoire.com. One Payhip store is easier to trust than a second cart built to look like an agency.
  2. The commercial licence leads with exclusions. A $79 file that can be resold, printed on merch, or used to train a model is not a licence.
  3. Personal packs stay at $4–$6. Growth is supposed to come from the commercial archive and service work, not from more cheap wallpaper SKUs.
  4. Every collection page shows watermarked previews. If the buyer cannot compare desktop and mobile before Payhip, the store failed.

Tech stack

  • HTML / CSS / JavaScript
  • Payhip
  • GA4
  • Watermarked previews
  • Standard Commercial Licence
  • Cursor (AI-assisted)

Live store

Open the catalog. The collections, the free sample, and the commercial archive are the proof.

Shop the store Free sample

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