Here’s a great blog post by Pam that we came across, showing how you can build a great looking Project Wonderful ad (or any ad, really, though we appreciate she thought of us!) using only your browser and Flickr’s photo editing software, Picnik.

Since Flickr is free to use, this is a great option for members who don’t have or don’t want to install any photo editing software on their machines. Or maybe now you can capitalize on a few spare minutes at work…?

Thanks Pam!

We just rolled out some new updates to the network: mostly under-the-hood stuff, including security upgrades to prevent AJAX attacks. The most visible is that our old “you haven’t uploaded a member photo yet” image has been changed. We thought we’d give a bit of motivation behind the change here! It’s a small change, but it has interesting motivations.

It really comes down to polishing the member experience. The old icon was of a robot silhouette, in Project Wonderful blues, with the text “no photo has been uploaded” on top. Not bad, right?

There were a few issues with this that became apparent over time. One was that the image was often displayed at a 60×60 size: small enough that the text was hard to read, so you’d either skipping it or gloss over it. The other issue was that, when looking at search results, this default picture was in the same colours as an ad box’s category and size. It conflated important information (the fundamentals of the ad box) with more fun information (hey, it’s a picture showing me what the publisher looks like!).

The new image is a blue and white crazy face. It’s fun, it’s not easily confused with other information on the page, and there’s a lot of whitespace in it – which dovetails nicely with the “nothing particular has been uploaded here” semantics that the image is meant to convey.

So while it’s a superficially simple change, there was some thought and analysis put behind it!