WokiDoki – A New Type of Online Design and Collaboration Platform for Artists and Content Authors
Two elements that immediately set good content apart from the crowd are stunning design and typography. It can get the reader to quickly comprehend the content, build the right perceptions and leave lasting impressions. Glossy catalogs or National Geographic magazines are examples of creative designs in the paper form.
A good WEB page is created by the joint effort of an artist and content author. The content author provides the intent and concept at a high level. The artist uses imagination and creates the best possible layout to express it. Or, the artist provides templates and the author plugs in the content. In the current approach an artist uses desktop tool and creates templates. A WEB developer combines content with the template and makes available as WEB pages. This process can be improved a great deal by WokiDoki application described in the following section, bringing in benefits of better quality, higher efficiency and cost savings.
WokiDoki is a hosted application on the WEB for content design, distribution and collaboration. It empowers artists and authors to work together online for creating quality content quickly. Artists create WEB-ready templates using its online designer. Authors customize these templates online and publish them on WEB or social networking sites. The online designer has all commonly used features of a desktop application. It can also integrate the output of desktop tool. Therefore it can deliver WEB-ready templates without compromising quality. The artist can publish these templates in a public gallery organized by category and searchable by tags. A content author selects a template and customizes it using a simplified version of the online design tool. In simple mode, the design tool is so simple that anyone can use it. WokiDoki further streamlines the workflow of WEB content creation by letting artists and content authors exchange messages and tasks. For example, someone has a need to create a catalog for jewelry. Searching for template itself can be a daunting task; or customization of the template may be needed. In such cases, the artists and content author can interact with each other by sending messages, sharing folders, designs and templates.
As an example, the author publishes a message on the public message board of the application:
“I am looking for 4-5 different templates for a jewelry catalog. We standardize on blue theme. Here is the link to our WEB site for the color scheme. Any suggestions are welcome?”
The artists who are already well versed with their creations can offer their templates through private responses. For example:
“Here are templates that will work great for you. I will be glad to discuss any customization need”.
The new process described above is illustrated in the figure below(Fig 1)
Fig 1: New Process- Online Design, Customization and Collaboration
Recapping the discussion in the preceding paragraphs, the new process streamlines the collaboration among artist and content author. It results in improved quality of content on the WEB which in turn results in engaging user experience. It lowers the cost of content creation. Templates are not only a wonderful way to build quickly and amazing looking content; they can also motivate authors for writing articulate content. Authors with passion for a subject can focus on content for effectively conveying the message across. Artist can focus on creative designs without having to worry about HTML, CSS syntax. Overall, the new approach enabled by WokiDoki offers several benefits over the traditional method.
The subsequent sections discuss the following aspects of WokiDoki with screen shots.
a) Advanced Design Mode for Template Creation
b) Easy Design Mode to Customize a Template
c) Template Gallery
d) Image Gallery
e) Collaboration between Artist and Author
f) Integration with Social Networking Sites
Advanced Design Mode for Template Creation
WokiDoki online designer provides Photoshop, Illustrator or Publisher like free page layout and is WYSIWYG. The templates created using it are directly usable on the WEB (referred as WEB-ready). It assists the user in the complex operations like image editing, cropping, rotating, shading; complementary color scheme computation; object properties such as color gradient, paddings etc. It provides all basic editing features such as drag drop, resize, multi-level undo/ redo, text-font, text-styles, colors etc. For certain kind of content, special fonts are useful. The problem with the use of special fonts is that they are not available to the browser. Therefore, it supports advanced typography by displaying text in image form through server side Fonts. When required, it can integrate with the output of desktop applications.
Fig 2: WokiDoki WYSIWYG Online Designer in Advanced Mode
End User Customization Mode
In end user customization mode, a user quickly flips thru templates. Once the end-user selects a template, she/he changes the content such as text, images in minutes and publishes on WEB. Off course user can always switch to advanced mode to leverage the full power of the online design tool.
Fig 3: Designer in Simple Mode for Template Customization by an Author
Template Gallery
WokiDoki provides a collection of a wide variety of pre-built base templates. These templates can be used by content author to publish content. These can be further customized and re-published as new templates. Fig 4 shows template gallery using fast flipper.
Fig 4: Fast Flipper for Template Browsing
Image Gallery
WokiDoki provides Image Gallery with a rich collection of images arranged categorically into folders based on theme, intent, subject, etc. The images are made available by WokiDoki. They can also be made available by other photo stock providers. Other members can also provide images for public use for free or fee. Fig 5 shows screenshot of an Image Gallery. Images are categorized and stored in folders. The interface is as simple as windows explorer interface.
Fig 5:Gallery of Images
Collaboration
On WokiDoki artists, authors can collaborate by sending messages, links to designed pages/ templates, file attachment, sharing folders or assigning tasks. It is provided within the same application therefore easy and convenient to use.
Fig 6:WokiDoki Collaboration Message
Fig 7:WokiDoki Tasks
Fig 8:WokiDoki Files Sharing
Integration with Social Networking Sites
WokiDoki pages or collection of pages (called books) have a URL. User can publish these URLs anywhere on the WEB. WokiDoki will soon provide integration with popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook to publish content directly without having to cut and paste the URL.
Conclusion
WokiDoki is an application with Online Design Tool that works like Photoshop or Publisher, a template publishing framework and a collaboration platform. It is integrated with social networking site.
One question we are normally asked, how is WokiDoki different from the Blog, Google Page Creator, Yahoo WEB Hosting or Ning. WokiDoki is used for creating one page or a flip through book of pages that have layout different from the WEB site pages. WokiDoki pages are like a flier, brochure, card, catalog etc. These pages have arbitrary placement of images, text in them; they can be dragged around and placed anywhere. WokiDoki also helps in making pages viral through social networking WEB sites. There are situations where it is useful to create one page than build a WEB site pages and distribute. Examples of such cases are advertising an event, special menu of the day, coupons, special promotion offer, real estate listings and advertisement page of Yellow Pages etc. It is also useful for creating Flip Through Digital Catalog that can be linked to the WEB site.
WokiDoki is an online content creation, publication and collaboration platform integrated with social networking sites. WokiDoki can also be deployed and used by enterprises inside firewalls.
