Graphic River has launch their awesome re-design of their massive community site. Since the site is a great resource for all graphic designers, I went ahead and digged up some new features and functionality and compiled them into this post, hopefully you guys will find it useful!

For people who hasn’t across them yet, Graphic River is an extremely popular community site where you can buy and sell Layered Photoshop, Vectors, Icons and Add-ons. So if you need any stock files for your design, go ahead and check them out. Or, you’re really good at Photoshop, make some awesome designs and sell them the layered file there.

In this post, I will take you through some exciting new features and functions based on the re-design of GraphicRiver. Take a look, I’m sure you will pleasantly surprised :)

And by the way, Graphic River is an Envato MarketPlace, and here is a bit of intro for Envato:

Since coming on the scene only three years ago in August 2006, the Envato marketplaces have been growing at an unbelievable rate. They now boast highly active communities, have over 200,000 members worldwide, and are home for tens of thousands of digital items available for purchase.

- Source: Envato MarketPlace Press Release

The New logo

Yes, they made a new logo for Graphic River. I’m sure there must be heaps of meaning behind this redesgin (trying to link between graphic and … river, for instance). But I have to say the spotlight of this Logo is that Font – MgOpen Modata. I personally really like it and the best thing is this font is open source!

Also the designer of this logo, Kai Loon, has an interesting post on his blog talking about his experience in terms of the logo re-design, so take a look if you’re interest :)

Enhanced Search Engine

Everyone knows a good site search means everything, espeically for a massive community site like graphicRiver. So without a doubt, they have also greatly enhanced their search engine – as stated on their blog entry:

We have been working hard to improve our search and packaged in with the launch are the ability to search within categories, portfolios, collections, search by tags, search by attributes, search users, search the wiki from support and many other search improvements …

Source: The River Current

With the result page, the layout is clean and easy to follow, and you can sort your result by Relevance, Rating, Sales and Price:

Great, isn’t it? Oh, I forgot to tell you that you can search across multiple categories, too. Just tick all the checkboxes!

Recent Item from Author You Follow

Another awesome feature! Similar to Twitter, this feature allow you to follow your favourite authors and view their latest files on your homepage. Convenient eh!

There is no limit number of author you can follow. Plus, the author that you follow on other Envato marketplace site (e.g. themeforest) will appear on Graphic River, too. In regards to this new feature, here is what the designer has to say:

We’ve created this feature so our community can capitalize on all that social networking has to offer, and now that we’ve laid the foundation for this, we will be really building on it.

- Cyan Ta’eed

Forum Makeover

Yes, the forum also went throught a huge makeover. They’ve brought an all-new UI including first reply and last reply, better styles in the posts, email updates from forum threads, the ability to see threads and posts by a user, and a new recent threads sidebar. And they’ve linked up the marketplace blogs and forums so you can chat about blog posts on the forums as well as see the latest news and announcements from inside the community!

The MarketPlace Wiki

A comprehensive Marketplace Wiki has been added, where you can read articles on all kinds of topics, such as how users can increase their passive income through the marketplace referral program.

It contains tons of articles, tips and FAQs about not just Graphic River, but the whole marketplaces!

Ok that’s for this post! Hopefully you will find these info helpful and if you want to know more about those new features, simply hop onto The River Current – Graphic River Blog!