TodaysArt08 was fantastic! Last Friday and Saturday night The Hague (The Netherlands) felt like the cultural epicenter of the world, with Compagnie Retouramont dancing buildings vertically and Electroheads componing melodies with self generated lightning, Interactive playgrounds in the City hall and Nouvelle Vague playing the crowds in the Anthon Phillips Theatre.Ten professional photographers worked with us, capturing 40 of the 200 acts that performed in the city centre of The Hague. After each act the photographers dropped their images at our booth and we directly uploaded selections into a live photostream. The stream ran embedded in todaysart.nl, bright.nl, boomerang.nl and other websites. For the stream we used a regular Viewbook pro account, but with a reversed running to get the last uploaded images in front of the gallery.

We would like to thank the photographers that worked with us. Thumbs up for: harmendejong.nl, diknicolai.com, philnijhuis.nl, rudinswagerman.nl, christophvoorn.com, annafotografie.nl, irisvetter.com, michaelelbers.nl, jozefscuric.viewbook.com

We’ve teamed up with TodaysArt international festival for adventurous creativity that takes place 26 and 27 September 2008 in The Hague, The Netherlands. TodaysArt 2008 is a weekend of unique and cutting edge artistic showcases, an inspiring audiovisual stronghold of all different contemporary currents and crossovers in art, music and technology. Online galleries for participating artists will be provided by Viewbook so they can easily promote themselves and the festival. Check out todaysart.viewbook.com and share the galleries with all art-loving people you like. The widget above holds a selection of artists that will perform at the festival. Click the share icon and see how easy that goes.

We’re setting up a live photo stream on the website of TodaysArt and some mayor news sites as well. We are going to shoot with eight professional photographers and will upload things from a glass house in the center of the festival. It’s great how this cooperation shows the versatility of Viewbook. All is done with use of one regular Viewbook pro account. Oh yes, check http://www.todaysart.nl, the embedded gallery that’s a Viewbook as well!

Today I (the person in black) gave a small presentation to 150 students who are going to do usability tests with Viewbook. Around fourty groups will observe how test persons work with Viewbook and deliver us their findings. We’re very curious what they will come up with. If you find anything that could be more clear with Viewbook in your experience, please let us know.

Wow, we have quite a lot of new stuff for you. As you can see we’ve completely redesigned our website. The goal of the redesign was to communicate a more complete picture about Viewbook; to show it’s strengths, ways of usage and benefits. You should definitely check out the Tour and Examples of use sections to see what you can do with Viewbook and how people use it. We’ve also added a new support site on Getsatisfaction which we’ll tell you more about in a later post. We hope you like it. But there’s more…

More Viewbook for Less Money
Probably the biggest news is that we’ve changed the pricing and specifications of our accounts. You get more for lower prices! The Standard account is now $9,- a month with 1000 images. The new Pro account is $19 a month with 5000 images. For existing users: to benefit from the lower prices, login to Viewbook and choose to signup for one of the two new accounts. Your current subscription will be changed, and you will be billed less the coming month. See the new accounts and pricing.

A Lot of New Viewbook Features
We’ve developed a bunch of much requested new features over the last months. Beside some Image Manager optimizations we’ve created a crop function within the webpage editor. You can now frame your images in your portfolio- or project pages. We’ve also added more font types to choose from.

the new cropping tool

We completely tidied up the image galleries. We’ve added a transparent navigation bar, password protection for keeping your presentations private, google analytics for individual presentations, share options, and a range of enhanced embed options. Check out our post New Image Gallery Options for more details.

We hope you like all the new stuff. Let us know what you think in our new support & forum.

We’re updating Viewbook in the weekend of Saturday 6 and 7 September. We expect some downtime of our service at Saturday September the 6th while we upgrade our systems.

Thanks for your support,
– The Viewbook team.