Design for the Future
By: Trevor O'Brien
Tags: Technology, Collaboration, Design, Storytelling

Design for the Future

Every day, our expectations for exceptional design get a little loftier. The emails and newsletters we check, the social media stories we tap and scroll, the GIFs and stickers we text — they’re setting the bar high. So when it comes time for you to promote your business on Instagram, email your customers, or make an important presentation on Zoom, it’s daunting. Designing those visuals is hard.

At Projector, we believe the way we all work with design needs to change. The number of professional designers is growing, but not nearly as fast as the number of professionals who need design: marketers, small business owners, creators, thought leaders. The future lies with tools that bring these two groups together without forcing either to compromise their work.

Our goal is to make design more inclusive than it’s ever been. We built Projector to be a collaborative, graphic design platform that works well for everyone. Powerful enough to support advanced multimedia layout and editing, but accessible and approachable for someone who’s never used creative design software before. We want to help more professionals become design-capable, and we want to help teams work better together to elevate their best-designed work.

In 2020, we crossed some major milestones on our company journey, including making Projector publicly available over the summer. Since then, more than 100,000 stories have been created on the platform.

And we’ve got more exciting news to share.

New investors

We’ve very happy to announce that we’ve raised $10 million in a new round of Series B funding led by Foundry Group. Mantis Venture Capital and Van Wickle Ventures have joined as new investors, and existing investors Upfront Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Upside Partnership also participated in the round. We’re incredibly thankful for their support.

Product forward

With our major release in June, we made the first version of Projector freely available to the public. Since then, we’ve made many improvements and launched a number of new capabilities:

Our first set of advanced graphical effects, made possible by our custom WebGL engine

“Colors in use,” which makes designing with color easier and more consistent than ever

New story formats to support email content and custom creations

Ability to create HD GIFs, for all the places you need a GIF that looks as good as a video

Library views for better story management

Moving forward, we’ll be using our new round of funding to focus on two major areas of the platform:

Expanding our creative capabilities with clearer, easier-to-use interfaces Supporting more sophisticated team management and better collaboration

Customers that inspire

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have realized that staying connected to customers with a digital presence is more important than ever before. We’re very proud that design-forward brands like Maude, Mister Jiu’s, Newness, HitRecord, Avaline, Tanya Holland and Brown Sugar Kitchen, Dominique Crenn and Crenn Dining and agencies like Butchershop are using Projector to move fast and build customer connections across all their different channels.