ambrosius.ai goes Birthday

Everyone knows this problem. Your grandma is soon celebrating her 75th birthday. A good friend knocks the 40 or you're entitled as best women on the upcoming wedding of you friend. Packed with high expectations and full of motivation to prepare something special, you don't know what to do. Zero time, yet the pressure is on and on you.

Now, ambrosius.ai is here for the rescue.

Similar to our dead easy way of creating farewell booklets, we just published a way to do the same for birthday or wedding booklets. Following our mission - with ambrosius.ai, we want to make the process of collectively crafting a birthday gift for a beloved person as simple - yet as personal - as possible.

With some major upgrades to the platform, is was never easier to accomplish this previously challenging task.

Flexible way of creating your questions

ambrosius.ai started as a tool for crafting highly personalized farewell booklets. The set of questions and the resulting layouts and designs were built around this idea.

With the newest update, we are now able to generate forms to gather content way more flexible. This allows us to address new audiences, for example birthday communities or wedding guests. We can basically ask any question you have in mind to your contributors. While currently done in background, we soon plan to publish an editor that will allow you to do this yourself.

For now, you start with a set of pre-defined questions and our Customer Support will help to customize them to your needs.

Here are some sample question our first customers used to craft a personalized birthday booklet:

• What is a particual strength of "Harry"?
• How did you first met "Sally"?
• Tell us one thing you appreciate the most about "Rosy"?

In parallel to a more flexible way of creating questions and engaging with your fellow crowd, we updated our photo layouting algorithm.

Upgrading our Picture Layouting Algorithm

User generated content is tricky to layout. You never know what users will upload. Especially with pictures, the challenge to render them beautifully is not to be underestimated. Varying filetypes, image dimensions, image quality, colours, view angles and the type of content that is presented are just some challenges you face.

Following our core value proposition of making the process for crafting beautiful booklets super, super simple - the editor of a birthday or weeding booklet should not be asked to layout images one-by-one. Instead, pictures are layouted automatically. For now, we use a simple, yet powerful structure to differentiate between layouts for single pictures, horizontal and vertical galleries, special images (like screenshots) and portraits uploaded for personal greetings.

All content is rendered dynamically. No matter if people upload 10 or 1000 pictures. We can handle 5 contributors or 50 or 500. We do not restrict the amount of pictures overall or the type of pictures one uploads. This is what differentiates ambrosius.ai from other platforms around photobooks.

Easy process, easy collecting, automatic layouting, beautiful print.

Layouting images goes hand in hand with layouting the overall booklet.

How we structure a booklet based on user generated content

As discussed so far in this article, ambrosius.ai is now able to handle more types of questions and added functionality of layouting images in various ways.

There's one more challenge we came across while building this product update. With new types of content, an unknown amount of contributors and a new audience, the final booklet for a birthday or wedding feels pretty different to a farewell gift.

We were astound by the sheer amount of pictures uploaded by a single mother.

Also the amount of guests and contributors was way bigger than our usual business customers and their respective team sizes.

We therefor improved our page building algorithm

• We implemented a cleaner and more dynamic page rendering component for Word Clouds
• Our Text Grid component received a polishing
• All pages are now able to be rendered as left or right pages in a booklet
• We implemented a sorting algorithm for pages that makes reading the book as fun as possible
• We are able to showcase some uploaded images alongside an individual greeting, boosting emotions