Ofoto was one of the first digital photography companies, making it easy for people to share and access their photos digitally. It was founded in 1999 in a warehouse in Berkeley, CA and was sold to Kodak in 2001 after moving into office space in Emeryville. In 2005 it became Kodak EasyShare Gallery and was sold to Shutterfly in 2012.
I’d grown up processing negatives and printing in darkrooms at Syracuse and in San Francisco (Harvey Milk Photo Center) and I was hesitant to give up the tactile joy of printing images so I still used my film camera even after starting my job in digital photography. On a solo trip to Italy in 2000 I brought both digital and film Nikon cameras. I finally let go of my film camera when I didn’t take it on a trip to Uganda in 2005.
“Uncluttered, effective interface….Ofoto is a joy.”
CNET 2002
I started as a p/t consultant who helped launch the frame store and managed the production of cobranded photo sites (including Apple). A year later, as Director of Production and User Experience, I handled research, design & production of features and task flows. The feature redesign project (ofoto 3.0) that I led was featured in “Making the Web Work” (one of the first books to discuss in detail the unique challenges and issues involved in designing Web-based applications and services) as “one of the Web’s most thoughtfully designed online services.”
At this job I learned even more about office politics but also so much about data analytics, user research, and project management. I left Ofoto in late 2002, took a short break to take a handful of art classes (printmaking, collage, photography), and next ended up at CafePress – “a company that works with designers to bring the world millions of designs on hundreds of different products.”
