We had a contest at Etsy to turn 100 of the best Treasury lists into limited edition prints. The objectives of the contest were: 1) define what Etsy is visually, while showcasing a few of the amazing items at Etsy; 2) to give away at festivals to help promote Etsy as a marketplace to buy and sell all things handmade; 3) to collaborate and showcase our community's outstanding artistic eye; and 4) as a result of all the incredible submissions, to create a Rich Internet Application that took advantage of new and existing features in Adobe Illustrator, Flash, Bridge and ExtendScript CS3.

Etsy members could create their own posters own using the Poster Sketch tool, or simply adding the word 'Poster' to the beginning of their treasury lists.

Please see this forum thread for details on the contest.

The results of the July 2007 Poster Contest are in! View them here!

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling all things handmade: clothing, music, furniture, software, jewelry, robots. We launched on June 18, 2005.

The Treasury allows any Etsy member to create their own set of featured items that will look just like the Etsy homepage. You name the list, choose the theme, pick the items and arrange them any way you like. Each list exists for 48 hours then disappears. (Embrace temporality!)

Showcase phenomenal items, make a birthday wishlist, suggest holiday gifts to friends and family or just pretend that you have the awesome power of picking the featured items for the homepage.

Because Jared built this, there’s jubilant multi-user features inside. On the front page you can see the cursor and avatar of every logged in user browsing there (in real time). Below every set of items there’s a mini chat room and a place to leave comments, so while viewing you can meet people with shared affinities. There are also some hidden features to be discovered (so he tells me, I haven’t found any of them yet).

Etsy user sweetestpea has created a great little guide illustrating how to use the Treasury. You can find it here.

PS. The philoneologists of the Web world have already created a word for this type of thing: shopcasting. You’re broadcasting your shopping picks. So when someone asks you what you’re doing, you know what to tell them.

After the final list of winning entries is determined, we launch the Poster Tool Normalizer swf Panel within Illustrator CS3, which converts the data (image ids, user names, etc.) from each entry into a formatted text string. Then we click on the magic Generate button which does the following: 1) it dynamically creates the Bridge code, passes it from the ActionScript Method to the JSX Method which passes it to Bridge via BridgeTalk and begins to download the images from the server. Bridge is used because it has the beautiful Web Access Library which is a preferable method of downloading multiple images without interruption; and 2) upon completition of the downloads, the ActionScript method for dynamically importing, populating, laying out and formatting the styles of the text is run.

Etsy Treasury

 

Etsy Normalizer | swf Panel within Adobe Illustrator CS3 (rt) | Finished Poster (lt)

 

Proto-type of the Etsy Poster | July, 2007 | Giclée Print