Pixelapse

Five years ago, Min Ming and I had this notion that designers didn’t have access to the same types of structured collaboration tools that programmers had built for themselves with CVS, SVN and later git.

Min Ming had worked as a designer at Google where he found that assets were internally organized in a single massive shared folder. Finding the latest version of a file was nearly impossible with weird naming conventions like “app_icon_version_2_final_final_final.psd”. As a developer on the receiving end, I had experienced the harrowing, manual process of having to export each individual asset from a Photoshop file at various sizes just to be able to commit it to our code repo. The designer ↔ developer collaboration experience simply felt broken and it was insane to us that no one had tackled this problem before.

With our own experience in mind, we set out to create a platform for designers to organize, iterate and collect feedback on their work together. Fast forward three years, we introduced a new way for designers to work together and made a small dent in promoting the idea of open-source design. In early 2015, we joined the Dropbox family to further our vision of bringing an open collaboration platform to a broader audience beyond design.

As part of Dropbox, we have continued to invest in our vision of building out a compelling suite of productivity features that dramatically improve the design collaboration experience. With support for Adobe Creative Suite files including .psd, .ai and .eps, rich version history support across moves, renames and file edits and the ability to annotate images and documents with comments, we believe that the core Dropbox product offers a strong alternative to Pixelapse.

Today, we are shutting down Pixelapse as a standalone product but its story does not end here. The original vision we had for the company will continue to be served by Dropbox with a far reaching impact on millions of users.

Keep designing!

Shravan, Min Ming and Michael

Timeline.

  • Idea is born - "Github for designers - use it to display their portfolio"

    Min Ming and Shravan have the first discussion around creating a “Github for designers”. Codenamed Folio.

  • First Floor Labs

    We moved into our first home at FirstFloorLabs in Palo Alto.

  • First line of code committed

    folio init on GitHub

  • Accepted into YCombinator

  • pixelapse.com registered

    The folio codename was retired and we decided to rebrand as Pixelapse. A combination of Pixel + Timelapse to signify the evolution of designs on the site.

  • YC start date

  • Show HN

    We showed off a sneak peek of Pixelapse on HackerNews and received a slew of feedback and sign ups. We were making something people wanted!

  • StartX move in date

  • YC Demo Day

  • Hired first employee!

    Michael joined us as our first employee.

  • Closed seed round

    We closed our seed round raising from wonderful investors - Nabeel from Spark Capital, Salesforce, Amitt and Joel from Zynga, Josh Reeves from Gusto, Matt Cutts from Google, Shing Tung Yau from Harvard, Digital Garage, YC, a16z, Start Fund and SVAngel. Many thanks for their immense support!

  • First paying customer

    After a few months in private beta, we quietly turned on paid plans and had our first paying customer on the first day!

  • Pixelapse v2 launched out of beta

    The New Pixelapse blog post

  • Pixelapse officially announced to the world

    We officially launched to the world on TechCrunch.

  • Launched Pixelapse for Teams

  • BOLD launch

    We launched BOLD as a space to share our thoughts. Our very first article spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the milkshake icon’s appearance as a share icon in Google Photos.

  • Open Design Movement

    We started the Open Design Movement.

  • Pixelapse Joins Dropbox

    Bittersweet moment when we announced that we are joining Dropbox.

  • Dropbox comments launches

    Comments come to Dropbox!

  • Dropbox launches revamped design previews

    Great design previews come to Dropbox!

  • Dropbox launches annotations

    Dropbox introduces annotations!

  • Pixelapse ceases new signups

    :(

  • Pixelapse sunset

Milestones.

20,541,100

revisions

92,060.188927227 GB

storage

Some highlights.

We started the open design movement. Design is fundamentally collaborative. We believe that the best ideas grow and expand with the input of others. These are some of the highlights: