(A primer on Oekaki boards)

If you have not noticed from my projects section, I am working on a new Oekaki board which I call BlueJot. The origin of the name spurs from my desire to see/hear people say, “I want a BJ“, or “I’m going to get a BJ“, kind of a double entendre. I know, very immature of me, but it’s probably one of the few remnants of who I used to be back then. In fact, the slogan for BlueJot might as well be, “Get a BJ now!”

I got inspired to make a new one after reading Kotaku and seeing that Atlus Online (yes, the video game company) set up an OekakiPoteto (which was developed by me 8 years ago). I said to myself, “Surely there has to be something better than my piece of crap oekaki board!“, but after a search on Oekaki boards, I didn’t find anything that could really be OP’s successor, other than the closed-sourced 2draw, which is developed and run by my friend Marcello. (Note to self: prod him to allow use of his Lascaux applet when I see him tomorrow!)

I’m not really surprised since the board is an art board, for an art community, you can’t expect star programmers in that pool since their primary skill is most likely not programming.

Anyways, I’ve been drawing an initial set of wireframes on how I think this Oekaki board should look like in the end run, and I thought about the intention of the Oekaki board, and what it means for those that use it: exposure of art, communication/feedback from that art, and collaboration of artistic works.

So, in my wireframes, I’ve decided to make the art as prominent as possible rather than the artist profiles themselves.

A lot of inspiration for this design comes from Flickr, and a bit of 2draw as well. No navigation is present in the wireframes, since I’m unsure how to design that portion yet.

If you look in the project repository, I have been working on the core modules and libraries, which is built in a custom build of Symfony that I’ve developed. My decision to use Symfony was based on my almost two-years experience with it from my Notemine project, and at work. Anyone who’s a decent programmer would be able to easily extend the system, and write plugins for it as well.