Dmitry Monin

Before building a home for visual stories, Dmitry ran a digital agency. He and his team worked with major European brands including Audi, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, UBS, Interhome, and X-Bionic, among many others.

For UBS, the team collaborated with Razorfish on the frontend experience for Planet Art, an app for discovering contemporary art news. The project won a Red Dot Award for Communication Design in 2015.

Dmitry had always kept a journal of his life through photographs. Alongside his work as a software engineer, he loved being outside with his camera, walking and noticing things. But on a small phone screen, the pictures never quite felt the same.

He tried Instagram and felt limited. Then he tried Webflow, thinking a quick website would do. Instead, he found himself working through menus when all he wanted was to arrange his photographs and publish. It felt slow, and it didn’t feel made for photography. He wanted the pictures to look good on a big screen as well as a small one.

With family overseas, he imagined a new kind of photo album he could work on anywhere, at home or at a conference in Tokyo. A place to write the story while it was fresh. When he was old, he wanted to open it with his grandchildren and tell them about his life, rather than scroll through a social media feed.

So he started building whenever he could. On Saturdays, he would wake at 5:30, while his girlfriend was still asleep, and go to the office. At 9:30, when she woke up, he would get on his bike and cycle home. Those early mornings gave him energy. He couldn’t stop thinking about what he was making.

He wanted to build something valuable that could last. In 2024, he closed his web design agency, closed the office, and decided to focus entirely on Arc.