Time
- 2015 – present
Role
- Concept
- UX Design
- UI Design
- Frontend Development
- Sales
In 2015 I noticed an emerging trend in professional social media: text heavy images (or “meme” images), used to create attention with concise quotes, interesting text snippets and listicles.
Images are one of the most sucessful post types in social networks based on interactions and can play an important role in transporting key content and statements.
Having a connection to the social media team at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung I noticed a demand for an easy to use tool to create this kind of images. Although there were services already on the market, they lacked some substantial features. Most importantly: fully customizable templates with defined boundaries according to corporate identity guidelines.
I created a concept and design for the Citajo app and created a first version which was adopted and used successfully by the whole team.
Through word-of-mouth propaganda soon other organizations showed interest and I teamed up with web development agency FLYnet to advance Citajo technically which made it possible to meet the demand and improve the feature set.
Corporate Identity Driven by Templates
Citajo is working with templates which are designed based on the customers needs and visual corporate identity. These can incorporate customer or brand specific
- logos
- colors
- typefaces
- icons
- grids and alignments
- other visual elements
The provided image formats are optimized for the specific social networks.
Custom Control Options
Each template comes with its own optimized options. This is improving the user experience greatly and is speeding up the process of creating the images, while also setting the boundaries to stay within the desired visual appearance.
The templates and available options and boundaries are defined in JSON format in the backend of Citajo.
How it works Citajo in Action
Exemplary Output
Through its JSON driven template system Citajo can easily adapt to new social media outlets and other channels as well as their ever changing supported content formats.
Success Clients
Originally designed for the social media team at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Citajo quickly was adopted by other companies and organizations. Thankfully this was solely possible through word-of-mouth by happy users.
Takeaways Learnings & Conclusion
Citajo was a very rewarding project for me. It was very satisfying to see how this specialized “long tail” concept met a market demand and attracted interesting and namely clients.
It also showed that even small applications, created with a limited amount of development experience can be extremely helpful tools and inspire people in their daily work through a straightforward user experience.
With more and bigger clients of course the development demand grew. This ultimately led to working together with an agency – my former employer FLYnet – which is now supervising Citajo.