Responses by Lauren Nadel and Christin Neal, cofounders, MAFF.

Background: We created MAFF to showcase quality video content from around the world, emphasizing the creatives behind them through exposure of their talents. We shine a spotlight on contemporary and historic movements in music, art and fashion beyond the United States to celebrate cultural differences, while at the same time exploring everything that connects us.

MAFF is for everyone! For our growing community, we hope to educate and promote both discovery and connectedness through the love of creativity.

Design core: Our catalog of creatives, each of whom created the videos we post, remains a core feature of MAFF. We created this in response to the lack of resources available to learn more about the talent behind inspiring content. By elevating these creatives, we hope to give them the exposure they deserve while enabling audiences to learn more about their practice and appreciate their contributions.

Favorite details: We take pride in the platform’s filter tool, one of the ways to better get our audience to interface with specific content—especially discovery through location. Here, for example, a user can learn about recent or past art installations that have taken place in a city of their choice. In our Forward section, this same feature can be utilized to discover a variety of artists who play a pivotal role in a selected city. Through this, hopefully that particular city’s range of perspectives and cultures can be understood by the user.

Challenges: MAFF consists of an archive of more than 6,000 hand picked videos and a catalog of more than 5,000 creatives, which continues to grow by the week. Elevating and celebrating this work while making it accessible to the public challenged us to develop an easy-to-use yet powerful interface. Additionally, we were tasked with finding curatorial solutions to help categorize content and engage specific users. Meeting the challenge of developing a way to properly tag content, as well as enabling our users to create playlists, gave us the creative freedom to curate content in response to the tastes of our audience.

Technology: We are big fans of Isomorphic JavaScript for the benefits of its performance and maintainability. Node.js runs on our servers, while React is responsible for much of the client-side application logic.

Special technical features: MAFF is ever evolving. It is important for us to have complete flexibility when building and exploring new ideas, so we saw it necessary to develop our own CMS—without question, this is our most vital tool.