Personas Improves the Artist Experience

oremj

2 responses

Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds easy-to-style, easy-to-change skins to the browser.

Since the Personas project launched, the extension has been downloaded almost 5 million times, and the gallery has welcomed over 13,000 designs.

Over the past three weeks, the Personas development team has released two updates to the project. Much of this effort was driven through community feedback, particularly from the Personas discussion group. In the earlier release, we enabled pagination and sharing on the site, localized the extension in additional languages, and ported Personas to Thunderbird. In the latest release, we focused on improving the experience for the Personas artists who create and share their work in the public gallery.

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Improving the Artist’s Experience

A major goal for the Personas project is not only to scale a gallery of art, but to give each artist a platform to create and promote their work. In the latest release, we aimed to make it even easier to create Persona art, and to enable each artist to build their presence within the gallery. With these objectives in mind, we added the following features to the project:

  • 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.

madonna-sub-gallery

  • 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.
    • greenpeace

    Each Artist Page Now Include a Personal Description

    • 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.
      • Old Byline

      Old Byline

      New Byline

      New Byline

      • 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.

      tutorial

      What’s Next?

      The Personas project will continue to evolve quickly with 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.

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

      2 responses

      1. suneel gupta wrote on :

        Search would be a valuable addition to the gallery, and the Development team is currently working on it. You can see the details of the bug here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489246

      2. Da Man wrote on :

        I noticed when you use this thing, it doesn’t allow you to search! I find this utterly frustrating when I want to a persona that fits what I’m into or my personality. You really need to add a search engine to this thing!