Image Spark Live

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