Fun fact. I mostly paid for my car with money I made from Flash games back when that was a thing people did.
2019 Visual Refresh and Product Update
IntroCave had a few big changes in June! I rolled out the first major design change since taking over the site last year, which included: a new color scheme, a new homepage layout, fancier dropdowns on the main navigation, and a new download/checkout flow.
New Colors
I posted the joke below on my twitter, and it's actually not super far off the mark. I'm not a great designer, so my redesign process basically involves browsing through hundreds of other designs until I come across something that strikes my fancy.
This was the actual inspiration for the new color scheme (via Raw Pixel.
It's still dark enough that I didn't have to do much with the logo or navigation, but moving away from the drab gray lets me use some splashes of color more liberally around the site—LIKE KIWI GREEN, THE BEST COLOR.
New Homepage Layout
The old home page was dark. Super dark. And not that interesting. It had a bit of a BUSINESS and BRAND vibe, whereas I feel like most of the videos that get sold here are for smaller businesses, gaming channels, and other fresh YouTubers. The old graphic treatment felt like it was trying to sell to fortune 500s, whereas the new layout is hopefully a little more playful and fun.
New Dropdown Menus
This is a super minor tweak, but it's been on my TODO list for almost a year—and it feels great to finally spice these boring Bootstrap dropdowns up a little bit.
New Download/Checkout Flow
In redesigning the new download flow, I decided to remove a couple of options: you can no longer purchase 720p videos and you can no longer choose MOV as an export option (95% of people chose mp4 anyway). I don't think these choices were holding many people back, but now the download form isn't a form at all. It's just a checkout page: do you want this in HD or not?
HD video sales between 720p and 1080p have been about 50/50 since taking over the site, but I feel like that has had more to do with price than what customers actually want. Most intro makers charge a subscription fee or significantly higher price-per-video, so having a $4.99 option situated me firmly at the bottom of the market. The thing is, I don't think the 720p intros are a good option. Videos are pushing more and more pixels all the time, so if anything I need to start offering 4k.
I'm going to let this change settle for a little while, but I'm hoping there will be more positive benefits downstream. Now that a video has a single price that's not tied to the number of pixels, I have a little more freedom to play with price later on down the road. That crazy awesome particle effect that takes 10 times longer to render? Maybe that should cost a little more. At the same time, maybe a really basic logo reveal that renders in a couple of minutes shouldn't cost anything at all. I don't have a timeline for when that type of differentiation might go live, but it's always been my intention to bring back free intro videos when I could figure out how to make it work financially.
Feedback
Feedback so far has been pretty positive! I've had several people reach out and mention the new design, and so far no negative feedback. If you've got comments or feedback on the new direction just drop me a line in the usual place: support@introcave.com