Founded in 2012, PicMonkey is a photo editing and design platform built for individuals and businesses to create powerful designs for social media, marketing and beyond. PicMonkey’s ever-growing library of effects, graphics, tools and fonts on top of a resource center with tips and tutorials makes designing easy for everyday creatives.
With 10 billion images made, over 450,000 paid subscribers and millions of mobile users in more than 200 countries, PicMonkey has offices in Seattle and Dublin.
Initially, Parkside was tasked with improving and maintaining the existing PicMonkey web platform based on Flash together with their internal team. At the same time, we worked on the relaunch of their new platform with WebGL to harness the potential of a modern web technology stack.
Although the end of Flash was set for late 2020, what made it imperative to switch was that leading browsers would have Flash disabled by default starting mid to late 2018. By then, hundreds of thousands of users had to be comfortably and seamlessly migrated to the new platform.
The project rapidly unfolded as a multifaceted scheme in which a multitude of tools and technologies was utilized and more and more of our skills were put to the test – from designing the software architecture to developing for web and mobile. Aside from the extension and the maintenance of the existing platform as well as the launch of the new one, Parkside was also assigned to work on the relaunch of PicMonkey’s mobile apps.
We were engaged as a PicMonkey co-creation team with a web and mobile unit (up to 15 developers at the same time). All projects are realized through agile development processes. Though we operate from our headquarters in Graz, we regularly send teams of developers to Seattle.
- successful launch of the new platform (in time and budget) before leading browsers disabled Flash by default (starting mid to late 2018)
- successful launch of new mobile apps to offer state-of-the-art mobile experiences
React / ReduxJS / Typescript / WebGL / Redux Sagas / Python / Django / Go / Ruby / ProtobufJS / Kiwi / Jest & Pupeteer / C++ / WASM
Real time collaboration / Save as you go / Cross-continent team / Continuous integration / Agile workflow / 3rd party integrations / International content / Subscriptions and single item purchases / Desktop and mobile platforms / SEO focused pages / In-depth tracking and analytics / Unit and integration testing / QA / Automated bug detection
Ongoing since 2015
— VP Client Solutions
jaritz@parkside-interactive.com