Today’s launch of “Image Spark”:http://imgspark.com/ means a great deal to us. It’s a product of our “Labs initiatives”:http://teehanlax.com/labs/, which lets employees take a break and focus on non-client projects — be it for the sake of creativity or to simply learn something new. In this case, it meant taking a core team of 4 people and dedicating them for 3 months to conceive, architect, design, build, test, refine and launch a tool for creative professionals.

Image Spark enables people to instantly capture, tag and upload images to a community-based site. To make uploading images as easy as possible, we created a FireFox plugin and a Mac application. You can see what’s inspiring others by browsing the community library. Image Spark also lets users drag images onto moodboards that they can share with their team to help determine the visual tone and style of any given project. Have client work you don’t want others seeing? Just mark them private when you upload them and they won’t be seen by others.

We settled on this project after realizing it would help us share our individual image libraries more efficiently. We all have our own sources of inspiration and our own methods of capturing and saving those images. We realized we could share Image Spark not just with each other but with the entire design community. It can be useful for professionals beyond just web design. Whether you’re an interior designer, an architect or a fashion designer, if you need to visually capture ideas or inspiration, this will hopefully be a great help.

For now, each account is given one gigabyte of image storage and two moodboards. It’s limited because it’s free, but in the future we’ll introduce ways to extend the offering. It’s too soon to say if it’ll be a paid model or not, but a logical first step would be to introduce an ad supported model.

Even though you won’t see a “beta” starbursted graphic (circa 2005) on the site, it’s most certainly in beta. As the site matures, we’ll be refining the experience. This will certainly include tweaking the existing elements as well as adding some new features. For now, we’re focused on making sure the fundamentals are there and working.

We’re pretty transparent in terms of our development process. If you’re interested in keeping up with it you can follow us @ “twitter.com/imgspark”:http://twitter.com/imgspark.

Lastly, we want to sincerely thank all involved in its development and testing. It’s a huge accomplishment to get something up of quality and meaning in such a short time.

You can sign up and share your inspiration at “imgspark.com”:http://www.imgspark.com

We’ve had quite a few people ask us when Image Spark is going to launch. While we can’t nail down a specific date yet we are entering into the final stages of testing. The entire site is built and functioning well. Also ready to go are two of the core upload utilities – A Firefox Plugin and a Mac client. We’re hoping most of what we catch in the next couple of days are minor fixes. If so, we should be sending out invites to those who “signed up”:http://www.imgspark.com/signup.php before the end of the month.

For those who are interested in following its progress in a little more detail you can “follow us on twitter”:http://twitter.com/imgspark.

We’re still a few weeks away from opening image Spark up for private beta but it’s coming along great. Instead of just showing screenshots I thought this time we’d share a short video. It illustrates the architecture of the image libraries and even shows how you can create and add images to moodboards (no actual moodboard editor yet – may next time).

Don’t forget:
Sign up to be notified when Image Spark launches.

We continue to make excellent progress on the development front of Image Spark, though it’s still too early to give an actual release date. However, what we can provide you with is look into how you’ll upload images to it.

There are 3 different methods to upload images. We’re going to try and get all of them ready for the public launch but the private beta will likely only include one or two of the following.

1. Browser Upload

Not much to hype about here. Just browse for an image file through your browser, add meta data and upload it. It’s the least attractive of the three methods but it doesn’t require a plugin or software installation. It’s good for images you may have already saved locally, but beyond that, the other methods are superior.

2. Browser plug-in

This plug-in will enable a contextual menu when using Firefox. Just right click an image, choose the “Upload to Image Spark” menu item and the system will launch a window of the image and provide fields for you to describe, tag and provide source information for it. This plug-in will be for Firefox only.

3. Mac menu bar application

This application ties into your Mac’s screen capture utility. Simply choose the selection type you want by using the menu bar app or customizable hotkeys. Once your image selection is made you can add your meta data and upload. It’s great for capturing stills from movies or images from Flash-based sites. For launch it’ll be Mac only, sorry PC.

We’re still taking signups on the preview site type=”text/javascript”>preview site type=”text/javascript”>AKPC_IDS += “676,”;

So far, the response to Image Spark has been really positive (even though we haven’t revealed a whole lot). So we think it’s time to show a little more. Image Spark’s Moodboards.

Moodboards are comprised of a collection of images arranged on a canvas. The images can be positioned, layered and scaled using a simple interface – so simple that there really isn’t much of an interface at all. While its uses are entirely up to you, we think they’re a great way to explore and set a visual direction for your projects. The screenshot below shows an example of how you can add images of colour, type, textures and objects into a composition that can help visually describe a desired aesthetic.

Get on the mailing list if you haven’t already at the preview site. We’ll notify you the second it launches and will be inviting a few people from the list to try it out pre-launch.

For those who missed previous posts on Image Spark you can find them here: Preview 1, Preview 2

Today we’re going to start revealing some details about our upcoming product, Image Spark.

We’d describe it as a creative resource pool that helps you collect and find great examples of design. In addition to traditional tagging it also incorporates a unique way to let you organize these images using moodboards – more on these in a later post.

While we think it’ll be a great tool for many creative professionals, we’re really building it for ourselves. Most of the designers here, myself included, often find things online that we look to later for inspiration. Bookmarks don’t always cut it because often times it’s just a part of something we’re viewing that we like or find inspiring. We collect photos, typography examples, data visualizations, interface elements, etc. by taking screenshots or saving images on our desktop where they’re eventual thrown into a folder for later perusal. Essentially, this tool is going to allow us to capture any image, from any site and instantly upload it to the community based site.

Here’s a first look…

Next week we’ll be sharing some more work in progress. Until then, get on the mailing list at the preview site. We’ll notify you the second it launches and will be inviting a few people from the list to try it out pre-launch.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting details and screenshots of an upcoming product we’re building called Image Spark. In the mean time, you can get on the mailing list at the preview site. We’ll notify you the second it launches and will even be inviting a few people from the list to preview it.