toonNews

Three years ago, on November 15, 2007 this site went online. A lot of things have changed since – most important of all, there are a lot more great cartoons and users. Just imagine that we were desperately longing to reach that magical number of a hundred cartoons. Today there are over 89,000. But, actually, things started to get serious pretty early on. We were really surprised how fast people from other countries joined the site. One of the earliest “international” cartoons was this one by Shahid Atiqullah (Afghancartoon).

Memories

People tend to remember what they did on historical dates – here is what each of us did on that fateful day three years ago:

Bernd couldn’t bear the tension of staring at the computer screen all day. Instead, he spent the afternoon at a local bar called “Pillhuhn”. He had to walk there on crutches because he had broken his ankle. The doctors used seven screws to fix it. Theyshould have been removed in 2008 but they are still in there – there’s just too much to do.

Max took a day off after working hard for weeks. He had been coding HTML until the very last minute.

Becci / Battlestar only joined toonpool.com in April 2008. In November she was still writing her BA thesis. She also dreamt that she was Dieter Bohlen’s girlfriend and wet his bed.

Paul was staying in the United States. He had not heard of  toonpool.com yet. On November 15 he held a presentation on Disney World, wrote an exam on Southern Literature and went to bed early. He joined toonpool.com in August 2009.

Lars / Ches wrote an email at 1:47 AM. It said: “toonpool.com – now awailable”. He also provided the very first cartoon. You probably need to know a German browser game called “Space Pioneer” to really get the joke.

Some History

We would like to offer you a glimpse into the evolution of toonpool.com:

Click here to see an early layout, dated May 2007 – only four weeks after the initial meeting.
Click here to see three stages in the development of our logo.
Click here to see a later design for the page (please note that the logo is already in place)
Click here to see the last stage in designing the layout (June 14, 2007)
Click here to see a very early (and very small) design for the toonpool guy (September 8, 2007)
Click here to see what the site looked like in October 2008 before the first relaunch – it’s pretty close to the 2007 design. Ah, the lamella.

Outlook

Over the years we introduced several new features to toonpool.com and did some stuff that was only remotely related to the site. Some of these things probably need some more thought (toonBattle, anyone?), others went great – take the toonpool.com exhibition in Izmir, for example. That’s probably how life works. We have quite a lot of stuff planned for 2011 – new exhibitions, new features and a major relaunch. Maybe we will even change that rating system. Maybe.

And finally…

We are  glad to have such a great community – and obviously none of this would have been possible without you. We hope that you will stay with us in the years to come. And we would like to give an extra shout-out to everyone who sent in their version of the toonpool guy. They are awesome – just look at them:

the toonpool.com team

© toonpool.com

Tags: anniversary, birthday, jubiläum, toonpool

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 6:49 pm and is filed under 2010, cartoons, Community, toonpool.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.