Crayon design search engine goes mobile to generate inspiration anywhere

Crayon, a design search engine aimed at discovering image concepts for marketing campaigns, today launched its new mobile platform, following a two-month beta period. 

The Crayon platform currently hosts some 13.7 million marketing designs, with 500,000 added each day. All the designs are chosen, filtered and ranked programmatically by crawling the Web and pulling in designs that its algorithms think are “interesting” from a marketing standpoint.

“We are building an insights and inspiration engine for marketers and designers,” Jonah Lopin, Crayon’s CEO, told TNW. “We want to help marketers and designers have a great experience around appreciating the best hyper-relevant examples and campaigns that have been done in the past to help them do a great job on whatever they’re building.”

A design might be interesting because of page characteristics or because the page has “traction” like a high Alexa rank or social media punch —  or because the company behind the design is interesting. “Our Web crawl isn’t random; we started with the Alexa top million and have been using the links from those sites to find a wider range of pages,” Lopin said.

Crayon has the capacity to add about 500,000 designs a day, and it plans to be at 100 million by the end of this year.

With that much stuff, how do you zero in on anything? The mobile site has five main filters such as page type, industry, CMS, traffic level and device (desktop and iPhone designs).

The filtering system is comprehensive, as the platform covers more than 40 industries from software and healthcare to e-commerce; some 35 page types from home pages, landing pages and pricing pages; and more than 15 CMS platforms like Squarespace, HubSpot and WordPress.

Crayon is a free service, letting users save their favorite designs into collections for specific uses, which they can view privately or make public for collaboration with clients and co-workers. Team members or clients with access to a collection can add images end even discuss saved items.

“We are hoping to build a delightful experience for people around appreciating the best ideas and examples that have come before, to help them get better results.”

➤ Crayon

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