(Identity) Change is Good

Today is a really cool day.

As you might have noticed, we had a little identity change. No, we aren’t in witness protection services. We just thought that we could align the logo and our look-and-feel more closely with our brand values – namely, vibrant, open, and thriving. We were fortunate to work with Kirk James and his awesome team at Cinco Design in Portland, OR. Cinco has done a bunch of work with some companies you might have heard of (Nike, Microsoft, Xbox to name a few). You’ll be hearing more about this in the next few weeks…

Creating a platform for photographers to organize and license their photographs is the obvious manifestation of PhotoShelter, but we also believe a lot in mobilizing the community and becoming a focal point for discussions about commercial photography. So we also went out and found ourselves a blogger named Rachel Hulin and started a new blog. Rachel will be writing daily about photographers, photo editors, photo buyers, art directors, pros, amateurs, and stuff going on in the industry in a way that we don’t really think exists. She’s going to have some cool guest bloggers as well, and we think it’s a wonderful opportunity to showcase people just like you, and all the interesting things you do.

The Personal Archive just got a whole new slew of features, including a bunch of cool modifications to the e-commerce cart like custom crop capabilities, which make selling your products a lot easier. And our customizable templates now support larger images (all the way to 1000 pixels) and larger thumbnails (up to 200 pixels). It’s a really great way to add some killer functionality to your personal website and enable searching and commerce.

In case you missed it, we made a number of buyer-side feature enhancements to the PhotoShelter Collection on Leap Day (Feb 29 for those of you who have eaten too much sushi with high mercury levels like moi) including batch add capability to the cart, a display preference to increase the # of images per page, caption rollover display, sequencing of lightbox images, and batching functions in the lightbox.

We recently launched a student competition called “Elevation 2008” over at the PhotoShelter Collection because I believe the children are our future. No, seriously, we assembled a kick-ass panel of judges from Nylon, Spin, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek and The Fader to review submissions coming into the PSC, and students can win some cool prizes to kick-start their career, while also creating a potential source of revenue for themselves.

Our very cool widget got a facelift to go along with the new logo. If you already have the widget somewhere, it’ll update itself automatically. Otherwise you can always grab it here to let everyone know that you’re all about PhotoShelter.

Speaking of which, for those of you that really want to fly the colors, you can buy a new PhotoShelter T-shirt from our merchandise page. Our friends over at Vuvox let us play around with their beta Collage product to make a very cool flash presentation showing the PhotoShelter Team wearing their gear around our offices at Union Square in New York. And for those of you with websites or blogs, you can insert some of our new “badges.” Pick one that matches your mood or your personality. We’ll make more.

Our direct sales force just added a few more people from a well-known agency that rhymes with “Betty”, and they are busy pounding the phones and the email to attract new buyers to PhotoShelter. Our sales and marketing efforts are really coming together, and we think there is a great sense of momentum about PhotoShelter right now that we’re very excited about.

Of course, your big question is probably about the fate of this blog. And you’re probably pondering the sadness you’re feeling in your heavy heart. But have no fear, my corporate blog will continue. It’s just that I wasn’t the most regular of writers, and each entry usually generated an email from my sister about my grammar or my spelling. But I remain undaunted.

Today’s changes are only the tip of the iceberg for our 2008 plans. We are so excited that you’ve joined us for the ride.