Emily Chang – Designer

Vox, Six Apart’s new blog service, launched on Oct 26. Vox puts the emphasis on personal blogging and sharing with friends and family. It features advanced privacy controls, a stunning variety of unique themes, powerful integration with other services like Flickr, YouTube, and more.

“Blogging is fun again. With powerful privacy controls that give you control over who views your words, photos, videos, and audio, you’ll never have to worry about who’s reading your blog. And with Vox’s hundreds of beautiful designs that can be enabled with just a few clicks, you can spend less time working on your site and more time keeping up with the people you care about…”

Max and I are pleased to have designed the Bunnylicious and Zen blog themes for Vox. We also loved working with the Six Apart design team on the initial task flow wireframes and UI for Vox (then Comet) during the summer of 2005.

Bunnylicious theme:

Zen theme:

Vox home (designed by Six Apart):

I’ve been a fan of Movable Type since it’s first release in 2001 so it’s been particularly gratifying to watch Six Apart grow from Mena and Ben’s idea to a global blogging company with multiple services just five years later.

Vox party photos:

The launch party on Thursday night was at Bimbo’s in North Beach and the crowd was a mix of people from Six Apart, techies, bloggers, friends, press, and many of the SF/bay area digerati. I’ve only been a part of this scene for a year now, but before I moved out here to pursue my own web dream, I followed the work of and was inspired by many of these same people for several years. As I stood there for a moment, I couldn’t help but think of the words of computer scientist Alan Kay – “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

See also:
Get your own free Vox account
My Vox world
My flickr set of the party
Chris Messina’s review of Vox

Vox, Six Apart’s new blog service, launched today.  Vox puts the emphasis on personal blogging and sharing with friends and family.  It features advanced privacy controls, a stunning variety of unique themes, powerful integration with other services like Flickr, YouTube, and more. “Blogging is fun again…” Ideacodes is pleased to have designed the Bunnylicious and Zen blog themes for Vox.  Read Emily’s blog post.

Last Thursday night was the official launch party for Stylehive, the social shopping community focused on new trends, products, designers, stores and experts. The launch party was fabulous. Thanks to everyone that came! As Styehive editor, Stephanie Wong, writes in the Stylehive blog post: “Hivers, bloggers, friends and fashion fiends from San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York gathered to mingle, meet and enjoy Bee-tini cocktails. It was a warm Indian summer evening in San Francisco, perfect weather for the Stylehive launch party on October 19th. It was a chance for the Stylehive team to meet many Hivers face-to-face for the first time. Lesley Scott of Fashion Tribes (Hive ID:fashiontribes) flew in from New York, John “Mochi” Park (Hive ID: Mochipopstar) jetted in from LA. During a special media preview, CEO Michael Carrier presented the latest new Hive features.”

You can check out some of the photos in my set at Flickr. Those of you who couldn’t make it this time, don’t worry, there will be many more Stylehive events in the coming year!

Stylehive has been our client for the past year and launched an alpha in March. We’ve enjoyed a great collaboration with them as their design team, working with them in an agile and iterative fashion, steadily developing and releasing new features, enhancements, and social aspects for members. With this launch comes several cool new features, including follows, wishlists, grid views and a new flash badge.

Follows
Follows allows you to keep up with your favorite Hive members and their activities in the Hive, whether it’s their bookmark recommendations, who they’ve been following, or new wishlists they may have added. Of course, you can also see who’s following you. As is the etiquette-du-jour on social sites, reciprocation is encouraged but not required :) Follows is a perfect way to discover new people based on their particular style and flavor of bookmarking. Just click the “Follow this” button anywhere you see in the Hive.

You can follow me by going to www.stylehive.com/emilychang and clicking the “follow this person” button.

Follows Magazine
Once you’ve started following people, you can grab the RSS feed or get a daily or weekly email update of your “follows activity”. The RSS feed essentially becomes your curated magazine of interesting people and bookmark recommendations. Of course, you can also jump around the Hive and grab other member’s magazine feeds. Stay tuned for lots of growth in this area as we unveil more features and customizations for personal magazines.

Read the Stylehive blog post about Follows.

Wishlists
Wishlists are perfect for the holidays and for keeping track of the things you desire. I’ve got a few wishlists going but plan to add others. Use them as shopping registries, gift lists for friends or family, quick copy your friend’s entire wishlist and edit to create your own. Of course, you can build your own wishlist and share it with friends so people know what you really want.

Here’s an example of one of my wishlists:

http://www.stylehive.com/emilychang/wishlist/gifts

Read more about this at the Stylehive blog post.

Grid Views
This is one of my personal favorites. After months of growing membership, the amount of data was also growing exponentially. Grid views lets you to scan bookmarks quickly by visuals and it’s one of the best ways to surf for products to “quick copy”.

This view shows you all the “most recent bookmarks” grid view:

http://www.stylehive.com/grid/recent/bookmarks.htm

These two views show you what is most popular “Today” in the hive:

http://www.stylehive.com/grid/popular/today

…and most popular “Week” in the hive:

http://www.stylehive.com/grid/popular/week

Flash Badge
The Stylehive flash badge widget displays images of your bookmarks with options for showing certain tags, transitions, background colors, and vertical or horizontal badge alignment.

Just bookmark your favorite gadgets, fashions, books, accessories, and trends and then tell the widget which tag to display. You can show a rotating stream of your favorite images from all your bookmarks, or from specific tags like “fashion” or “shoes”. It’s easy to set up and add to your blog or site. You can see mine on my about page. Check out the Stylehive blog post and get your own badge here.

Shopping Spree
Lastly, if you like contests, here’s a fun one for you. Invite a friend to join the Stylehive community during the month of October and you’ll be entered for a chance to win a $500 shopping spree at Stylehive top retailers.

Hope you enjoy and let me know what you think. Happy Hiving!

Stylehive, the social shopping community focused on new trends, products, designers, stores and experts, launched on Oct 19, coming out of alpha with a host of new features and a big party in San Francisco.  Ideacodes is the design team for Stylehive.  See my blog post for more.

Another toy art-meets-couture spotting caught on camera.  These Karl Lagerfeld Bearbricks are on display here in SF at the Chanel store, Maiden Lane, Union Square.  Not sure the cross-branding will be effective with Chanel buyers.

We were strolling through Union Square and I caught this great display of Manolo Blahnik shoes by Damien Hirst at the San Francisco Neiman Marcus Manolo Blahnik retrospective.