The Personas community has welcomed over 5 million downloads and over 13,000 gallery designs.

Since the Personas launch ten weeks ago, 5 million users have downloaded the extension, approximately 60% of which are based outside of the United States. The community has also welcomed over 13,000 designs from nearly 9,000 artists.

Collaboratively, a community of artists and developers have evolved the product in remarkable ways.

• People can more easily access, discover, and share art.
• Artists can more easily create and promote their art.
• Community members can more easily collaborate and contribute to the project.

We blog about this progress regularly, but here is a summary of what has been accomplished, as well as the project’s next steps:

1. People can more easily discover, use, and share art.

Through a series of five releases, the community has made the Personas experience more accessible, discoverable, and shareable.

• Localized in Additional Languages : the Personas extension is now localized in Polish, Serbian, Turkish, and Chinese. This is in addition to the other 12 languages that were supported during the last launch, including Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. In the future, we plan to localize the website with these languages.

• Ported to Thunderbird: thanks largely to the contributions of Huang Yaoquan, Personas can now be installed on Thunderbird. Integrating the extension into Thunderbird is a work in progress (see buglist), and Huang and others are continuing to make progress.

• Enabled Sharing: it is now easy for you to share Personas art work you admire with your friends. Each design’s detail page now has a ShareThis link.

• Added Pagination: as the Pesonas gallery continues to expand, it became increasingly important to organize the art in a way that enables you to browse all designs without performance issues. We included pagination in the All/All section of the gallery so that your browser loads the full gallery in sections, rather than 10,000+ designs at one time.

2. Artists can more easily create and promote their art.

Through the past five releases, we have added a easy-to-use platform for artists to create new Personas art and promote their work in front of millions of people.

• Artist Detail Pages: As the gallery expands, it becomes increasingly important for each artist to have their own personal space within the site to display their creations. In the prior release, we solved this problem by creating detail pages for each artist. So, if you have created several persona designs, you can now share your entire set of work by sharing a single link.

• Personalized Descriptions: Before the recent release, each detail page header included the same language. Now, each artist can also personalize their detail page by adding a description of themselves and their work. Existing Personas artists can add a personalized description here.

• Artist Display Names: Before the recent release, each artist’s user-name served as their byline. Now, each artist will have the opportunity to create a cleaner, less restricted display name for their work. Existing artists can add a display name here.

• Revamped Design Tutorial: Sean Martell developed an easy-to-read and apply tutorial (located in the “How To” section of the site) that makes it easier for each artist to create and share quality art in the Personas gallery. The tutorial also points to free online editing resources, which lets artists without access to Photoshop, or other pay-to-use editing software, participate in the gallery.

3. Community members can more easily collaborate and contribute.

• Expanded Discussion Group: The Personas discussion group now has over 100 engaged members posting an average of 10-15 thoughts every day. Members actively debate product features and support technical issues. The conversation continues to grow every day.

• Collaborative Product Vision: Community discussion also informs product development. Members actively suggest new features, including joeytwiddle who assembled a wiki page of suggestions, which the Personas development team is considering for their roadmap.

What’s Next?

Between now and 10 million downloads, we will continue to focus on creating the easiest, and most meaningful gallery experience possible, and serving as a strong platform for artists to create and promote their work . In the next two weeks, we will focus on a set of improvements, which include letting you search functionality to the gallery, and enabling you to create a “my favorites” category.

To evolve quickly in the right direction, we need your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki. We will continue to update you with the progress of the project. In the meantime, take a moment to celebrate how far our community and product have come in the past ten weeks.

– Toby Elliott, Myk Melez, Ryan Doherty, and Suneel Gupta on behalf of the Personas development team.