About us

Salon.io is a web-based application that allows its users to create an online portfolio of their artwork. Images are uploaded by simply dragging files from the desktop into the browser. The app offers a unique way in both presenting and arranging sets of images. The user is able to fully control the way the images are presented to the visitors. At this point our main focus is on photographers, illustrators and graphic designers.

Idea

In Salon.io, all images are placed on a canvas and can be freely dragged around by the user to create innovative and individual arrangements. Also the canvas itself can be moved to focus a certain point of a page. Images can easily be linked to other pages, other users or external urls. This gives users a great flexibility on how their visual content is organized and referenced. We believe that this tool will create new forms of presentation and visual storytelling.

Background

Sebastian Deutsch and Stefan Landrock developed the basic idea when they were guest-lecturing courses at the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design. Together with Mathias Bär, one of their students, they built a working prototype of their idea so they could watch students playing with it. When other universities heard about the project we were asked if we could host a system for their students, too. We eventually adapted the software for mittendrin, a photography project led by Felix Dobbert at the University of Dortmund. But Salon was just a raw prototype and not built to be easily deployable and customizable for other universities and so it was soon clear to us that we had to rewrite it from the scratch before we could think about adding more features or even customization options. Luckily, we met Jan Monschke, a student of media informatics at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, who was watching out for a challenging project for his bachelor thesis. Jan came up with the idea of transforming Salon into a Single Page Web App, a novel architectural style that offers a more integrated and efficient way for building interactive websites.

Technology

The backend of Salon.io is implemented in Ruby on Rails. The underlying database is MongoDB, a document-oriented database system that was chosen because of its flexibility and its very good integration in Rails.
Our app does not make use of the full Rails stack and especially the frontend tool chain is completely ignored because the frontend is designed to work as a Single Page Web App (SPWA). The communication between the frontend and the backend is realized with a REST5 interface and all data is being sent in the JSON format. To simplify server-side persistence and data modeling we make use of backbone.js, a MVC-like JavaScript framework. We employ Coffescript (wich compiles into Javascript) for the benefit of a concise and expressive syntax.

The Future

Our goal is to create smarter tools and interfaces for content and asset management in general. What we have in mind is something what could be described as a visual wiki-like system, with a revised approach to web software architecture and wygswys interfaces. This cms should be agnostic to hosting environments and should address a diversified group of potential users, basically anyone in between those who create contents by using software and those who use code to create individual content outlets.
We are beneficiary and supporter of open source and open standards and hope to be able to contribute our ideas to the community. We consider Freemium SaaS and FLOSS licensing very interesting business models.

For the beginning we are offering our services to art and design schools.
Are you a student of visual arts or affiliated in any way with an educational
or cultural institution? Seeking for an online gallery, social image board, presentation tool or web archive of artworks for your class / exhibition / department? We are looking forward to know you better ;-)

Get in contact: lrock@salon.io