Envato Goes Social

For any customer pool, there is a fierce battle between two big companies anywhere in the world, on any market. These days' battle for the web design and development community's attention is being waged between Envato Network and Template Monster. As a the recent blow in this war, a couple of days ago, Envato launched a redesigned user interface, introducing many new social features to connect their different marketplaces.

Considered by many critics superior in product quality to Template Monster, the company’s success resides in its marketing tactics. With far lower prices than those of their competitors, and the ability for any “average Joe” designer to submit their artwork and have it featured for sale on any Envato marketplace, the company is in our opinion heading for the right direction, in a collision course with Template Monster for their crown.

For those who don't know, the Envato marketplace is comprised of five excellent websites where artists can auction off their work. These include: GraphicRiver (where graphics designers can sell their vector or bitmap graphics), AudioJungle (where musicians and sound editors can put up for sale any kind of audio-related work), VideoHive (where people involved in movie management and video special effects can find, buy and sell video-related products), FlashDen (the oldest marketplace of them all, a pioneer in the world of Flash files auctioning) and ThemeForest (the jewel of the crown, a place where web-designers and web-developers can sell their web templates, PSD site templates and various web scripts for a good price).

In a recent interview with the Envato founders for their Tuts+ tutorials network, Collis and Cyan Ta'eed also disclosed that a sixth marketplace, 3DOcean, is in the works, and as the name states, it would be a place where 3D imagery and movie files could be found at the Envato characteristic low price. The interview can also be watched at the end of this article.

Besides these cool marketplaces, Envato is also the owner of one of the biggest, successful and critically acclaimed tutorial networks around the web, the Tuts+ network. These include (you might recognize a lot of them) the likes of: Psdtuts+, Nettuts+, Audiotuts+, Vectortuts+, Flashtuts+, Aetuts+, Phototuts+, Cgtuts+, WorkAwesome, FreelanceSwitch, Rockable, Creattica, AppStorm and many more.

But going back to the redesigned interface, the cool new features introduced in the marketplace started from fresh logos (just a redesign, the logo elements remained the same), continued to a brand new interface for all the marketplaces, then with fresh players for the media platform and the commenting system. New cooler buttons, icons and fields have been added to the interface, so if you didn't see the “work in progress” panels and badges, you could have had a shock the first time you accessed the site.

You can check all the changes in these screenshots.



Aside from all of these graphic enhancements (and we know the company is good at doing that), some social features have been added to the interface. The most interesting and prominent one is the change in licensing, which now provides even examples on what kind of projects and similar work the file can be used in. Also, the ability to add a user to a watch list has been included. This is out of the ordinary because we could not only follow a ThemeForest user on ThemeForest, but we actually got updates whenever that author listed new files on different marketplaces, like FlashDen.

All in all, we give a thumbs up for this facelift because the interface has not changed dramatically (quite for the better), and the new social features will help users keep in touch with other artists all across the Envato platform.

“With the launch of the redesigned marketplaces the foundation for building a fully operational social networking digital goods marketplace has begun!" commented Fuad Ta'eed, Envato representative, for Softpedia.