The Tilefolio story
For about twenty years I've been carrying around this idea of a place on the web for artists, makers, creators, creative types, etc.
It started around 2008, with the ambition of making "graphical, modular websites" (the first name was modulosite :). I was in my "graph theory" phase, so it looked like areas of content linked together, which you could "zoom" into (and of course you could zoom in again, and again, forever). We made a first version with a friend who gave me a hand with the design, it was pretty cool…
Then we moved to Egypt and, with a Lebanese friend I met there, we picked the concept back up to build "twalz". Fun fact: we went together to the commercial court in Cairo to register the company twalz.com, but my Arabic stopped us in our tracks: we needed an official translator… The next day was 25 January 2011, the start of the Arab Spring. My friend went back to Lebanon and the project went back in the box!
Back in France, a few years later, a musician friend asked me to build him a site to publish all of his work (music, videos, photos, drawings, texts, etc.) in a format inspired by the Radiohead Public Library, and by the early days of Myspace too (Myspace was cool)!
I took up the challenge, still with the idea of making it something lots of people could use. A first version came out (the result: slyapollinaire.com), built with my own two hands, no AI back then! On the same idea, I made a site for an architecture firm (oh-architecte.com), for my band, Picasol (picasol.fr), and more recently for a local association that puts on jazz concerts (autourdeminuit-jazz.fr). Each time the concept got a bit sharper, slowly but surely…
And then another friend came to me wanting to sell small, rather trendy ceramic pieces online, "worry stones". I took the chance (this time with an AI's help) to pool the sites together, so I could run lots of them easily, and to add a shop (worrystones.fr).
And there you go, Tilefolio was born!
What matters to me
The original ambition is still there: give artists and creative people of every kind a place online to show (and maybe sell) their work, with some strong choices.
- #content_driven: sites that look like their artists, since it's their content itself that makes the site.
- #do_not_track: sites built with no tracking, no ads, no social networks, no plug-ins, etc. It matters to still have places on the web that don't collect data! If you don't see that annoying window asking you to accept cookies, it's simply because there aren't any :) And no, nobody will know how many people visited your tilefolio, not the artists, and not big tech either ;)
- #brainstorming: ideas like the "tile", a unit of content with a media behind it (image, sound, video, text), which took my beta testers a while to get their heads around.
- A fair price, and no commission on what the artists sell.
With all this, I hope to add my own small stone to an Internet where creative work can be shared and valued.
Antoine, founder of tilefolio.com, November 2026