Posted by: keegan (155 posts)
July 7, 200912:10 AM

This post has been a long time coming! In fact, part of the reason I have been neglecting this fine website has been to focus on finishing the project about which I write.

I'm proud to announce the release of Muggmaker. I have been working on Muggmaker for over two years on and off. It started as a little Flash file in my "flash lab" folder on my computer and has grown into something much bigger.

Over the years, alongside my freelance illustration career, I have also been working at my other job as an interactive designer for WSJ.com. I had spent so much time writing Flash applications at my day job, yet I never had attempted a project that applied all that code to something that was all about illustration and animation. So in my spare time I kept jamming away at this make-a-face experiment, and kept evolving it.

At a certain point, I realized that I could also include all of the database stuff I had been doing, by making a full-fledged service out of the app, that would allow people to save their faces, and share them with anyone. So I slogged away building Muggmaker to be a web application with all the "Web 2.0" trimmings.

Enter Facebook. As I worked on polishing Muggmaker, Facebook got more and more popular. As of July 2009, Facebook officially claims north of 200 million active users (though it's rumored to be more like 300 million users). I knew I had to have SOME sort of hook into Facebook, but at a certain point, I decided to just go all in.

So now Muggmaker has been launched as a Facebook Application (I will launch a regular web-only version in the near future as well). You can make a Mugg, animate it, and share it with your other Facebook friends. You can also export a JPEG of your Mugg which you can use on anywhere else. It's been fun watching the first users make Muggs of each other, and celebrities.

So if you are on Facebook, please head on over and check out Muggmaker. If you like it, I'd love it if you could write a review, and become of fan of it as well.

Below is a quick video tour so you can get an idea what it's all about...I'd love to hear your feedback, and I look forward to seeing your Muggs!

Link: Muggmaker on Facebook