We’ve made some big changes today and it helps to describe those changes in the following way: we’ve enabled greater creativity by giving you a new set of frames to work with.

Frames are important.  My favorite Frank Zappa quote is:

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively— because, without this human appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a ‘box’ around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?”

What you create is defined not only by what you put in the frame, but what you leave out.  The frame is about the choices you make for how the work is created as well as how it is bound.

But too often we get wrapped up in thinking about what’s inside the box and forget about the frame we’ve chosen.  Over the last few months at Tabblo, we’ve certainly focused on better text handling and image control but without stretching our ideas on how we bound our tabblos.  For example, what if the tabblo didn’t scroll?  What if the length were fixed? What if a tabblo had many pages?  More broadly speaking, should the social Web be primarily a vertical medium?  Can the Web provide the same kind of rich, punctuated dramatic motion as film? And most importantly:  what new frames can we put on a social web experience to tell richer, more interesting stories?

Well, we think our community of artists, artisans, artistes, art mamas, art punks, and art snobs has the answer.  And that’s what we want to find out.

So here is what we are offering— other formats that take you beyond online tabblos to tell your stories.  Right now we have very traditional offline formats: posters, postcards, and (soon) books.  But we plan to go beyond that over the next few months and enable you to create your own online and offline formats.  Define your frame and share that with the community.  Design a scrapbook page customized to your liking.  Make a tabblo that allows the viewer to pause.  Create a format that scrolls from side to side.  Punctuate your story with pages.  Explore the options.  Stretch what it means to create a tabblo and hopefully you will find new ways of telling stories.

And as always tell us what you think.  It is always helpful to hear another frame of reference.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 12:17 am and is filed under corporate info, product news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.