The world of graphic design has changed tremendously over the past decade. Today, we still focus on the same aspects, helping users to be more creative and achieve the results easily and quickly on any given platform. Pixlr successfully came out on top and became the world’s largest online photo editing service because we focused on the right aspects: a simple and quick experience without any hassle such as login, start screens and loading time. Since then, my main focus is to move the existing web products from the old technology to HTML5/WebGL as well as to leverage on all the new possibilities that come with Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The founders of 123RF reached out to me to inquire if I still wanted to continue working on the products again. In 2017, Pixlr was acquired by 123RF, a premium stock image library, and one of the core business products of. With Autodesk going through a business model transition, they decided to focus on their core product portfolio that resulted in Pixlr’s development to come to a standstill for years. When I left the company, Pixlr had grown to over 60-70 million monthly users with just a handful of us working on it. The following years focused on Pixlr’s product launches for web, mobile and desktop respectively. In 2011, about three years post-launch, Pixlr was acquired by Autodesk, with a hit of 5-10 million unique monthly users.
While the initial groundwork took about a year to create, the first version of Pixlr became an instant hit among the creative community and it accelerated from there. Pixlr was created as a pet project over 10 years ago with the idea to enable photo blogging. Please describe the background behind founding Pixlr and the way it has evolved so far. In this interview, hear all about the story behind Pixlr from founder and CEO Ola Sevandersson. Pixlris a state-of-art online photo editor with just the right amount of easy to enable a quick and slick user experience for the non-experienced user.