Can Flickr 3.0 compete? (redesign exercise)

Posted by andyfastow on October 15, 2012 05:32 pm 10

The Problem

The problem? Flickr needs a little 'post-2001-ing'

The Goal

My goal here, is to collectively consider how to improve the outdated look and feel of Flickr. I've been a long time 'pro' user and I've recently noticed several of my contacts from over the years, have been leaving Flickr in favour of sites such as 500px.com (www.500px.com)

Personally, I feel that 500px.com has an excellent design. It makes quick work of displaying gigantic, high resolution photos that are the main point of attraction of any one page. I find that the YouTube-esque layout where the content is 'king', large and in-your-face, is a great way to display high resolution content, especially photographs.

Lately when I use Flickr, I feel like I'm logging into some sort of GeoCities style website. There certainly are advantages of using a stark white interface, but it's 2012 now and I think some darker colours and some well-styled CSS could be put to good use on Flickr.com.

The only goal here is to hopefully pull together some good UI/UX designers, and rethink how Flickr can stay relevant in the shadow of other, richer services. I've used Flickr, 500px, and various other flavours of photo-sharing sites but I still think that Flickr has a chance at being great again.

The Solution

This just started as a quick afternoon project of changing up the Flickr layout to see what else I could do with the same content in a relatively recognizable format. No idea what the best solution would be, but maybe we can start here:

via Flickr: Andy Fastow

(Pictures & designs: all rights reserved by me, but feel free to extrapolate as long as you link to this post. Some icons c/o http://www.iconspedia.com)

I'm certainly no Five Star designer, but I know that some Verge members are. Any ideas?