Creative Market for Photoshop

Creative Market for Photoshop(creativemarket.com)

89 points by dariusmonsef 13 years ago | 18 comments

cwilson 13 years ago |

This idea is simply brilliant. You've reduced the friction it takes for me to buy an asset that I might not have otherwise purchased to essentially one click, at exactly the right moment (the moment I need it, without breaking my work-flow or concentration).

My first suggestion would be to figure out how to market the hell out of this. There are some really great Photoshop plugins out there that I've seen pop up on HN maybe once or twice at most and I've spoken to designer friends in person who have never heard of them. The first step would be to look into advertising on the design blogs and sites like http://beautifulpixels.com/. You might then look into a sponsored post on DaringFireball or similar site (from what I've heard, the ROI on his posts is pretty good).

oo7jeep 13 years ago |

I love when products go deep for their core users. This is one of the best ideas and executions I've seen among any of the companies trying to create marketplaces for digital goods.

frankdenbow 13 years ago | |

Exactly, this is such a smart move.

bluetidepro 13 years ago |

This is an incredible idea coming from the Creative Market. Very well done. I wonder how long it takes Envato (Theme Forest, Code Canyon, etc.) to make a version of this for their products/sites.

iconfinder 13 years ago | |

Or Iconfinder :-D

BSousa 13 years ago | | |

I was sure www.iconfinder.com was your site, but I took a look at the profile just to see if I could copy paste it instead of typing it (I'm lazy).

You have the url as www.confinder.com there ;)

dariusmonsef 13 years ago | | |

Or you could integrate our API ;)

mattrandle 13 years ago |

Nice idea and implementation.

Was it difficult building the plugin for photoshop ?

I ask because I have been toying with building a photoshop plugin for handling feedback on designs. i.e. the plugin allows you to upload a design to a website where customers can comment. The plugin would allow you to view the comments from within Photoshop.

brianreavis 13 years ago | |

Tomorrow I'm going to write a post on all that went into making it. To be honest, it's not difficult to get into—with extensions running on top of AIR, the learning curve isn't steep. The main difficulties come from random platform bugs and poor documentation. Things like:

- Occasionally when a panel starts, the wrapper from Adobe that loads in your extension will be incorrectly sized... which leaves the panel with a giant white space at the bottom. To fix it, increment then decrement the height by one to get it to recalculate its size.

- On CS5.0 (only), the panel is rendered darker than it should be (so if you set the background color to the color the SDK tells you it is, you'll end up something that doesn't match up with the Photoshop UI (this might be mx:HTML specific).

- On CS6, mx:HTML causes a hard Photoshop crash sometimes (no idea why, it's blackbox). Posted on Adobe Forums... no one seems to know.

TL;DR: Barrier of entry is low. Strange issues make it hard. Sadly many of them are out of your control as a 3rd-party developer.

shuzchen 13 years ago | | |

brian initially started work on the extension, then I did for a few months, now it's back on brian's plate. In my experience it was rough debugging anything within the webview after being used to the power of chrome dev tools and firebug. For the most part I was able to test the webview bits in an actual browser, but it was those times where the embedded browser behaved differently that really made things rough.

Debugging things within AIR was easy though, and although I had near-nil prior experience with actionscript my javascript background got me up and running right away.

BHSPitMonkey 13 years ago | | |

Thanks for sharing those!

brianreavis 13 years ago | |

Just put up a post that gives a complete breakdown of what went into it — https://creativemarket.com/blog/2013/04/12/how-we-built-a-ph...

binaryorganic 13 years ago |

I like this, but it also underscores one of the reasons I'm skeptical of this specific marketplace. I find it very difficult to actually know what I'm buying. Assets are often little more than a generic description with a few hard to see thumbnails tacked on to show you what you'll get.

I've definitely found myself hoping for more detail / product information. While this looks well-implemented I wonder if it won't take me a step further away from what I'm buying, which is the reverse of what I want.

BHSPitMonkey 13 years ago |

I love that the actual experience (or something damn close to it) is usable right there in the home page. Great work.

mistercow 13 years ago |

While I appreciate that you're going for a Photoshop UI theme in the browser panel there (and I think it's very nice in terms of presentation), I think it's a big mistake to use decorative UI elements that don't actually work. It's impossible for a user to look at that panel and tell what is actual UI, and what is merely decoration, which is disorienting and frustrating.

TheCoreh 13 years ago | |

I might be wrong, but I think if you're a heavy Photoshop user (their target demographic) you'll be already familiar with the panels Photoshop provides, and their custom panel will draw your attention. IMO, the "Try Me" banner also ensures the user keeps their attention focused on the demo.

ThomPete 13 years ago | |

That really depends on what the goal is.

Personally I read what it could do and downloaded.

dariusmonsef 13 years ago | |

Are you talking about in the live demo on our site? Or in the installed extension. Because in the context of using the extension in the app, I think it'll make more sense for you.