Smilebox Blog

Smilebox is thrilled to have talented graphic designer Dani Mogstad as one of our featured artists.  Dani Mogstad has been working with computers and graphic design for almost 10 years.  She loves to work in Photoshop and got her start working in pre-press.  She married her high school sweetheart and after the birth of her daughter in 2004 she found another passion, scrapbooking.  It didn’t take her long to discover digital scrapbooking and her love for it.  Shortly after that she opened her own website, Design By Dani, selling her digital designs, where she has continued to be successful for more than two years. 

She loves photography and finds endless inspiration from her photos and her spunky three-year-old daughter. She also continues her first love for scrapbooking and if not designing she loves to spend an evening with her laptop scrapbooking all her treasured photos! Here are some of her most popular Smilebox designs –-              

Smileboxers can simply click on the images above and launch the Smilebox design.  For more of her designs just type Dani into the search field in Smilebox.  We love Dani’s work and know you will too!

Thank you to the hundreds of customers who submitted Smileboxes to our “Go Green with Smilebox” holiday contest!  We had a fantastic response and a great time seeing all your creations.  Expect to see another contest this Spring!   Without further ado, the winners are (drumroll, please…): 

Pat Oliphant (Grand Prize Winner!):

Amy Cooke:

Heather Krieger:

Beth Bridgeford:

Jennifer Roberts:

Terri Teal:

The grand prize winner, Pat Oliphant, received a Canon digital camera and the runners up received a year’s subscription to Club Smilebox.  Congratulations to all our winners for submitting heartfelt creations that reflected the true spirit of the holidays.  A special thanks to our distinguished panel of judges: 

   Kathy McDonald, Parent Map 

   Laura Glass, Parent Map and Baby Loves Disco 

   Erin Manning, host of “The Whole Picture” on the DIY Network

   Brittany Beattie, Creating Keepsakes 

   Lisa Bearnson, Creating Keepsakes

   Stacy DeBroff, Mom Central 

   Juliana Thornquist, Smilebox Aviator

Following customer requests, we have expanded our system to accept payment from more than 40 countries including Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guam, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand and more.  Welcome to all our new international Smilebox customers!  You can now use your credit card to purchase premium designs for $1.99 (US) or $2.99 (US) or subscribe to Club Smilebox for $4.99 (US)/month or $39.99 (US)/year.  With the premium designs, you can choose from hundreds of music options, print keepsakes and play Smilebox on a full screen without ads.

Howdy.  My name is Paul and I’m the Director of Technology here at Smilebox.  Smilebox is an interesting and unique company.  There are a lot of processes and rituals we follow that may interest others, so I thought I would spend some time sharing what happens “Inside the Box.”  In the next weeks and months, I hope to give you a glimpse of what makes Smilebox special, not only as a service, but as a place to work.  We take a lot of pride in what we do and spend a lot of time trying different ways to improve.  Some succeed and some don’t; but we always learn something.   

This week I’d like to start out by sharing with you a decision we made early in the company.  When we first started Smilebox, we knew we needed to do something a little different.  We wanted to ensure that we designed and built a service that was fun and creative.  Leveraging the idea that a product directly reflects the team that built it, we needed to foster a culture within Smilebox that was also fun and creative.  Explicitly designing the culture of a company during its early stages was a unique challenge and we attacked it directly. 

So, how does one go about cultivating a company’s culture?  For us, we defined a set of values upon which we would build the company.  Many of the founders of Smilebox, including myself, were familiar with various agile processes and the values they espouse.  For example, the values defined by Kent Beck for his Extreme Programming process are “Communication”, “Simplicity,” “Courage,” “Feedback” and “Respect.”  We wanted to define our own set of values that would set us apart and be guide posts for our future as a company.  After much thought and discussion, we agreed on the following values for Smilebox: “Consumer Centric;” “Creative and Technical Excellence;” “Family Oriented;” “Accountable;” “Transparent;” “Collaborative;” and “Fun.” 

Just glancing through the values we picked, I think you’ll start to see how Smilebox has built such a fun and creative service.  In my next posts, I’ll briefly discuss each value, along with why we feel it is important and how it is reflected in both our work and in our service.  Till then, happy Smileboxing…

Here are three of our favorite Smilebox creations recounting 2007 and the holiday season from Sheri, Holly and Sandy. These show us that some of our favorite photo memories can be the candid snapshots we “accidentally” get like the those of Sheri’s kids doing Christmas crafts or of the baby gazing adoringly at his big brother in Sandy’s creation.