Pixmac Founder Interview

Founded in September 2008, Pixmac is a fast-growing microstock site with a database of more than 10 million photos available for sale. The small team is based in Prague led by founder Vita Valka, a designer turned tech entrepreneur. Besides their flagship site, Pixmac also recently launched a stock photo site for people as well as vector illustrations. I had the chance to ask Vita a few questions about running his company…
Why did you start Pixmac?
There was a huge opportunity in the market. Traditional stock photos were declining, microstock was a rising star. I’m a designer and I was using sites like Pixmac for years. That was a great challenge for me.

Can you give me a brief overview of where the firm is today?
Pixmac is one of the Top 10 agencies in microstock worldwide. We have the best technology inside and we still refine it again and again to [...]

Site of the Month: Note & Point

Note & Point is a simple idea — a collection of well-designed presentations submitted by users. The gallery-style site follows the same principle of the dime-a-dozen CSS galleries but instead of showcasing websites, the site exclusively focuses on Powerpoint and PDF presentations.
Hopefully, this will inspire some of the cookie-cutter slide decks we see too often in the business world.
Aside from aesthetics, I was surprisingly pleased to find a lot of the presentations with quality content. Hmm, there could be unlocked potential here…

The Top 10 Application UIs for 2008 According to Jakob Nielsen

User Interface guru, Jakob Nielsen, just posted winners of the 2008 best-designed application user interfaces. There are definitely some good picks here but the irony is that Jakob, a well-respected industry expert and thought leader in UI, has one of the worst sites (in terms of usability, readability and user experience) I’ve seen. What was that thing about practice what you preach?
In any case, here are the results:

Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.
FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.
PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignMap (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, [...]

Design and Branding Inspiration

Need some creative inspiration? Here is a list of my favorite resources on the web…

Faveup provides design inspiration in four different flavors: Logos, Business Cards, CSS Websites, and Flash Websites.
Update: Faveup is now Creattica
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Webcreme is a very simple website gallery showing some of the newest and best CSS websites.
……………………………………………………………………………………………

DesignFlavr is a graphic art gallery showcasing some of the latest art and design trends categorized into several different galleries including Illustrations, Vector Art, CG Art, CSS Websites, etc.
……………………………………………………………………………………………

Logopond is a really great source for branding and identity inspiration. It features a gallery of some of the best logos designs using the latest in design trends.
……………………………………………………………………………………………

Most Inspired aggregates several of the most popular CSS galleries.
……………………………………………………………………………………………

Are you launching a website anytime soon? If so, you might want to check out Launch Soon – a gallery of ‘launching soon’ pages.