Blog

Conversation 02: David Leslie Anthony

By Alrik | June 22nd, 2011 | 7 Comments

 

“It takes any good young photographer at least three to five years to develop their own viewpoint.”

Mr. David Leslie Anthony started shooting in 1989 and worked himself to the top of the fashion industry. He now works for clients such as Calvin Klein, Cosmopolitan and Harpers Bazar. David moved from NYC to Los Angeles last year. Co-founder of Viewbook, Alrik Swagerman calls him in his hotel room in Chicago, the city where he moved to just a week ago and talks with David about cities, hotels, approaching clients, social media and of course portfolio websites. David gives his unvarnished view and valuable tips for anyone who wants to succeed in the incredibly competitive fashion industry.

Listen in iTunes. Subscribe to podcast RSS.

Related links
davidanthonyphotographer.com

Viewbook V3: Status update

By Rien | June 19th, 2011 | 12 Comments

Here’s an update on the progress of Viewbook V3, the project name for ‘Viewbook Version 3′.

Viewbook V3 is a new portfolio website builder, developed completely from scratch. A first version of the new ‘page design’ system is ready. You could call it a fully functioning prototype and it’s great to see all our ideas actually working in real software. Here’s a peak into what we were busy with the last couple of months and what you can expect in the near future.

Interaction design
The central question here is: What solution makes it really simple for people to design and create their own portfolio website, without defining too much or too less of the website’s design up front? It’s the sweet spot we’re looking for; you should be able to start easily and design a website that ‘feels yours’ without having to start with a blank page. It is simply too hard for most of us to design something good completely from scratch (we will support designers and web-designers in V3 though!). On the other side, we don’t want to let you choose from tens or hundreds of pre-designed templates that feel like someone else’s idea. We’ve designed a unique solution and I think we have it now!

Visual design
Ronny, our new guy, has spent his time designing the interfaces and all the necessary interface elements like panels, icons, buttons, etc. We’re now at a point where we have a good idea about all the needed functionality and how it will work. Time to start defining the definitive ‘visual language’ for the new interface, in such a way that it becomes uniquely Viewbook’s.

Framework
The fundamental interaction ideas form the foundation for the ‘technical framework’. This is a technical system – the heart of the software – that provides the main structure and functionality. It supports the main configurations, modules, interaction and data retrieval and storage. A major part of this system is implemented.

Modules
Modules are pieces of functionality that you can drag & drop into your page, like galleries, text and video. We’ve started with the gallery module, which will be implemented in HTML5/Javascript and the basic functionality is already there. Other modules that take shape are the ‘image grid’ – a thumbnail grid that you can fully customize and a new ‘horizontal scrolling gallery’. We’re going full swing on all the new modules in the coming weeks.

So when will it be ready?
It is very hard to estimate time needed for completion. We do not work with a planning that’s clear from the beginning to the end. This is to keep the flexibility to iterate, and change things until we think they are realy good. What we do is plan features into cycles of two weeks. Within each cycle we try to make something that’s ‘potentially ready’. This way it motivates to finish things, before moving to other features and it keeps the team focused and on track. Until now we have only planned one or two cycles ahead.

Does it include feature X?
The new system makes it much easier for us to include new features and it is also more flexible in itself. A lot of features that are requested will be implemented automatically because of how the new system works; it allows much more flexibility in designing your pages. If you have any ideas that you would like to share, be sure to take a look at our feature requests page. You’re always welcome to add yours.

What you can expect next
Your patience will be rewarded, I promise. I’m very proud our team comes up with so many great things each day. I can’t wait to show you a first ‘visual’ peak into Viewbook V3 and what you can expect in the first release in one of our next posts.

> All posts about Viewbook V3

Notify me when V3 Beta is available.


Introducing Ronny Wieckardt – designer at Viewbook

By Rien | June 16th, 2011 | 3 Comments

Well hello, this is about the 13th time that I opened my text editor to write a post on myself. I thought of all kinds of funny stories and came up with a lot of strange titles and ideas. But just like in good design, less is more. So this is me, introducing myself.

Ronny Wieckardt (27 sept 1982)
Interaction & Visual Interface Designer
Owner at CKDT
Interaction designer at Viewbook
I Enjoy: Life, Nice (creative) People, Minimal Design, Intuitive Interfaces,
Lomo photography, Electronic music, Drums

Working at Viewbook
I’ve been working at Viewbook since January this year. Together with Paul I designed the new Viewbook website. Currently I am working on Viewbook 3.0 which is going to be amazing! It is so much fun designing a complex piece of software, the Viewbook way. Everything you come up with is possible. It gets to be tested and redesigned over and over again, until it has got exactly the quality we want it to have. Also the concept of making something you like and to sell it, was new to me. I used to make things that clients wanted. But this new concept has inspired me to create my own designs and sell them.

Family
It may sound cliche, but the fact that Viewbook is owned by 4 brothers, makes the work atmosphere really pleasant. In discussions everyone is on the same level. There is a lot of respect. I feel like I’m becoming more and more part of the family. But maybe that’s because of all the babies these guys produce. I feel like uncle Ronny once again :-)

Thanks for reading, I look forward to keep creating designs for Viewbook and its users.

Viewbook Portfolio for iPad: The cleanest mobile portfolio

By Paul | May 20th, 2011 | 11 Comments

With the Viewbook iPad Portfolio App, your iPad becomes your true digital mobile portfolio. It allows you to sync, display and organize the work you already have in Viewbook into multiple portfolios on your iPad. Allowing you to show your work everywhere, even without an internet connection.

In the design of the app we wanted to keep a portfolio feel across all the screens and functions. We did not want to use the standard Apple interfaces, where possible, and wanted to create our own visual language. Keeping the interface as intuitive and simple as possible was a real challenge.

The focus throughout the development of this app has been practicality and keeping the initial feature set at a minimum. This allowed us to concentrate on the interface and making what’s there really good. So this first version is really simple, but powerful at the same time. It basically allows you to do three things:
- Browse all your Viewbook Albums on your iPad
- Store Albums locally for offline use
- Organize local Albums into Portfolios

So now, on your iPad you can always browse all your Viewbook albums, or make selections of Albums for potential client presentations. It always starts with the screen you’ve left open, so you can decide what your client sees first. As with any first version of a new app, we’re very happy to hear your feedback!

> Get Viewbook Portfolio for iPad from the App Store
> See features overview & post your feedback

In the works: Viewbook V3, The next generation portfolio website builder

By Rien | April 26th, 2011 | 41 Comments

We are very excited to tell you about ‘Viewbook V3′ which is currently being developed. The last two months we have been creating a whole new vision on what Viewbook should be in the near future. Here is a rundown of what we came up with.


Ronny and Paul presenting design ideas.– Music by: Tyler wat doe je?

With Viewbook V3 we bring you a completely new ‘next generation’ website builder. A flexible design tool that gives you more control on the creation and customization of your portfolio website. With the idea of you being able to create your portfolio perfectly, we’re working on the following ideas and features:

Modules & Galleries
We introduce a new concept called ‘modules’. A module allows you to easily drag & drop bits of functionality onto the stage. Portfolio websites need outstanding galleries and representations of your work. What we are creating are fully configurable collections, albums and contact sheets. Including horizontal and vertical scrolling galleries. Our focus is to offer you the choice how you want your images to display, including flexible cropping, sizing, alignment, spacing, and many more options. We’re putting a lot of effort in this to make Viewbook outstanding when it comes down to image display.

Many other features as modules
Simply drag & drop twitter feeds, social buttons, text-fields, images & video anywhere on your page. No need to add custom code or markup to text-fields anymore.

Adjustable page formats & layouts
You can start with predefined page formats. That works for most people. But if you think your site requires more options or a different composition, you can change many properties of the page; it’s layout, modules, order and alignment of elements. You can add new modules to your page, and create pages that combine galleries, video and text for example. This allows creating many design options and variations, while keeping the user interface simple to understand.

Redefined page editor
Center-stage in the the website builder is the page editor. This is what you will be looking at the most of the time, while creating your site. It consist out of editor panels (for page properties, modules and selection settings) and the stage ( your webpage canvas ).

Custom CSS
If you want all influence on how things look, we’ll add and option for custom CSS so webdesigners can change the appearance of any element on the page.

New user interface
With a lot more features and customization options, the interface still needs to maintain its clarity. Therefore we are redesigning the user interface, to let you work more intuitively and make better use of space. Bottom line is, we want it to be easy enough for people without webdesign knowledge and powerful enough for webdesigners. That’s a real challenge.

Other improvements
There’s too much to mention here but we’re also implementing a lot of other smaller features like; favicons, better video display, more menu styling options and scalable backgrounds.

That’s a quick overview of things to come. I understand it’s still very abstract. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the terminology just jet. Honestly, we have daily discussions on what things are called, and just started writing the Viewbook Terminology Manual.

So when will it be ready?
We have an idea but as with all larger software projects, it is very, very hard to estimate time needed for completion. So I’m not going to give a date, let’s say we’re working hard to get it released later this year. We keep you posted during the process as much as possible, and let you know when things become more clear.

Your existing sites will keep working in V3!
You don’t need to worry about redesigning your complete site from scratch in V3. So there’s no need to wait for V3 to come out. We’re also not planning to change prices or other terms.

If you have any feature requests please add them to our feature requests page. This way other people can comment and vote.

> All posts about Viewbook V3

Notify me when V3 Beta is available.


New Viewbook brother portrait

By Alrik | April 13th, 2011 | 2 Comments


photo: ©Ilse Leenders

Striving to be an open and personal company, we thought it would be nice to give you an idea of us, the people behind Viewbook. Last year we worked together with photographer Mamabart who came up with an idea for a group portrait and we really enjoyed the process of working with him. We thought it would be nice to create a new portrait every year, to use for our about us page and to share the creation process. But who to do it with? What would be the new idea? Tapping into the creativity of our Viewbook users for an idea sounded like a nice way to get in touch with more Viewbook users. The one with the best idea wins the portrait shoot. We received many ideas from Rome to Berlin, and there were some quite extreme ones in there. The one that really caught our attention and got us excited was the idea that Ilse Leenders e-maild us. Her idea in her own words: 

“What I was thinking about is to create a portrait in which the connectedness between you as brothers becomes visual. To make it seem like you are attached like a ball of wool or connected with some sort of web. Actually you are together making a sort of sculpture with the ropes or elastics. Also I would like the city of Rotterdam to be as background as this is the city where all the creation takes place.”

Ilse took us to the riverside and together with two assistants she wired us up.
See a short video of the shoot:

We are very happy with the result and hope you like it too! It’s on our new about us page. Many thanks to Ilse Leenders as well as all the other photographers who send in their ideas. Cheers!

Aperture export plugin for Viewbook

By Rien | April 4th, 2011 | 13 Comments

As of now a plugin to export images from Apple’s Aperture to Viewbook is available here. So from now on you can create new presentations and update your Viewbook website straight from your Aperture library.

On January the 29th I received this e-mail from Jean-Christophe Gallagher: “I am new to Viewbook, and I like it so far! I’d like to obtain an api key, as I am building my own export plug-in for Aperture.” I immediately asked Jean-Christophe if he wanted to make the plugin publicly available. Two months later it is ready and available for everyone to use! A big thank you to Jean-Christophe.

The plugin comes with an installer, exports IPTC data (captions) to Viewbook, allows you to select and create a new Viewbook album within the plugin and allows you to choose how to compress and size your images when exporting to Viewbook.

We’ve added the plugin to Viewbook’s add-ons page or you can get it via the link below.

> Download and instructions.

Share your work in Social Media!?

By Alrik | March 18th, 2011 | 3 Comments

With our new feature,  ‘Publish images to Flickr & Facebook’, sharing your images in these social contexts has become very easy. You can do it in just three clicks. But which of your images do you share on Facebook or Flickr and which do you not? And when do you or don’t you?

“I think, therefore I am”, is a famous quote from Descartes, which nowadays can probably be translated to  “I share, therefore I am.“ While on- and offline participation in social communities can take many different forms, the fact of the matter is that we all invest in social interaction. Sharing thoughts, ideas and work with people simply opens up new opportunities.

However on the one side, there’s the desire to be independent and autonomous as an artist, on the other side the necessity to share. It’s a challenge to find a balance within this paradox.

Brandon Schulman, in our first podcast, says the following:

“I don’t love mixing work and personal stuff, which is definitely an issue on Facebook. A blog is great for me. I see it as another way for people to get to know me without knowing me. I see all these things as a way for people to take a little bite, if somebody wants you they are going to get you, it’s important not to force things upon people.”

I’d like this post to be a start of a discussion about whether or not to share works on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media. And if yes; in what manner? Got ideas or insights that you like to share? Please post it in the comments!

New mobile Galleries for iPad, iPhone and Android

By Rien | March 17th, 2011 | 17 Comments

Developing fluidly functioning mobile galleries for the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices is not an easy task; dealing with memory issues, different versions of operating systems and many different screen sizes makes it a very specialized job. We’ve put a lot of effort in this and we’re very happy with the result. Here’s a breakdown of the major new features and improvements.

The touch ‘swipe’ navigation is improved drastically. We’ve also added image titles and descriptions and a new interface design. There’s a slide show option and loading and unloading of images is optimized for the memory limit of mobile devices. But that’s not all, we’ve generated special lighter mobile versions of your images to make them load faster for a smooth viewing experience, also for the slower mobile connections. The gallery works on any browser and any screen size on any device. The option to put the gallery as an icon on your iPad’s home screen is great for if you want to view it later or show it to someone else. From your home screen the gallery opens without a browser bar for an even cleaner view.

I think we can say we now offer the best performing and cleanest mobile galleries around. Happy to hear your reactions below.