Photolife

In 2006, way before anybody have heard phrase: “there is an App for that”, Grafica Minerva knocked at NotOnlyWebs‘ door with a very exciting project.  Let’s create an on-line service where people could create digital scrap books and get them printed in Grafica Minerva’s printshop, later on, the photo album will be delivered to the client by regular mail.  NotOnlyWebs takes the challenge and Photolife.es was born.

The process was not easy, at that time there where many hardware and software restrictions to be able to handle a great amount high quality images, edit them and compress them in a pdf ready to be printed at the printshop.  Let’s remember that six years ago printing on demand was a ground breaking concept, wait, still is for many.

During the development of the software the client kept adding features, and what at the beginning was designed to create one simple photo albums, now was capable to print posters, customized frames, calendars, agendas, four different formats of albums, greeting cards and notebooks.  Those changes brought a new set of complexity to the product development.  The way I like to explain my clients why this is not the best practice is pretty much like going to the barber and ask him to get your hair cut while your are running a marathon, there are just too many things that might go wrong.

1. Get your images together 2. Create your album 3. Mail it where ever you want.

The work flow had to be extremely easy to understand, highly engaging and flexible.  The user had to spend between half to four hours creating his album, every element of the user interface had to enrich the experience of creation.

In order to have consistency between projects we had to observe the constants and variables of every single project, so we can offer the same basic user interface to every user and provide all the features a specific product required.  So we came to three different groups, canvas, images and photos.  Whenever you where clicking an element you had the chance to select and edit the content and format of the element.

At the same time, we came to the policy of what you do not need at the moment you will not see it in order to maximize the work area.  So if you needed to access to the main menu you were able to see it once you place the mouse at the upper part of the screen.

Photolife gave me also the chance to spend some time making really nice icons, something I really love to do.

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Image edition icons

Choose from a frame to a photo album of your favorite soccer team.

Project management icons, describing type of the project and status.

 Photolife.es can be used in Catala and Spanish, you will be able to check the latest version of this project online.  Sadly most of the look and feel I created for this project is gone, since another company developed the latest version and legal issued did not allow them to use the previews software as a base.