Inkodye Printing System

Lumi is a new DIY alternative to screen printing. The process works on cotton, linen, silk, rayon, canvas, and any other natural & absorbent fiber. Once finished, your print is permanent and can be machine washed without fading. Link.

How To Display Your Artwork Online

A blog very popular with artists is lines and colors and it hosts two great posts about displaying your artwork online—one is about how NOT to show your work, the other is about HOW TO do so well.

This is intended as a rough guide for illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present a professional representation of their work on the web. If you’re just putting up your stuff for the benefit of your friends, do what you want, it doesn’t matter. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to have your art seen by art directors, publishers, gallery owners, webcomics readers, reviewers and prospective buyers, how you present it can make a big difference in how it’s viewed and received.

 Link.

Art School Ads

Team Detroit is the agency that created these ads for College for Creative Studies. The edgy ads, styled in the 1980's anti-drugs PSAs, warn parents to talk to their kids about art school ... or else!

Interesting Blog Stats

Andrew Sullivan was one of the earliest bloggers and is one of the most successful. His blog is The Dish (link) and he reports that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 120 days and 60 - 80% of them are abandoned within the first month. A site called Postary (for people who don't want to manage blogs but want to publish a single post to share) has developed a "typical" blog lifecycle:

1. Euphoric moment of inspiration
2. Pseudo-manical and self-indulgent perusing of domains
3. Careful consideration of theme and design
4. The inaugural post - "Hello world!"
5. The 2-4 post honeymoon phase
6. Waning and changing interests
7. Feelings of desperation and apathy from low engagement
8. Inevitable abandonment

I retain a lot of faith in the power of effective, well-managed blogs that focus on the needs of the customer and not the needs of the artist. As a resource for buyers—especially when there are numerous postings about all your work and the posts bear the title of the work—nothing beats a blog for the narrative that most buyers want to accompany the piece.

More about That Jobs Graphic

From the October 13, New York Times, by Kevin Drew:

Artists’ Logos Shows Reach and Hostility of the Web

Mr. Mak's version that recently swept the Internet.

Mr. Thornley's version.

HONG KONG — Few personal journeys can shed as much light on the age we live in as the one traveled by Jonathan Mak in the last week.

Mr. Mak, a university student in Hong Kong, went from being an unknown aspiring graphic designer to an Internet sensation after an image he produced spread rapidly across digital platforms after the death of Steven P. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple.

Mr. Mak’s design of a silhouetted profile of Mr. Jobs in the Apple company logo was shared across the Web and reported by media. And then, nearly as fast, Mr. Mak found himself being vilified.

With a speed befitting the technological age that Mr. Jobs helped usher in, Mr. Mak became the subject of derisive Internet postings and negative media reports. His design, it turned out, closely matched one produced earlier this year by Chris Thornley, a British graphic artist.

Link to full story in NYT.

Why Do Artist Websites Suck So Much?

The title of this post was taken of Andrew Sullivan's blog today (more on that later). Jesse Ford, the creative director of a New-York based design firm, feels much as the same as the programmer Andrew quotes. Here's a quote from Ford (who is focusing his firm's marketing on artists):

“As an artist myself, I am very upset by the uniformly poor quality of art on the internet”, said Josse Ford, Creative Director at BWA. “ Artists invest huge amounts of time and energy in their work and they need to take much more care in how they display it. This is particularly true now because more and more galleries and collectors are looking to the worldwide web in selecting and reviewing art purchases. Our aim at Beautiful Websites For Artists is to showcase each artist’s work as if it was in a museum or high-end commercial gallery.”

While many good artist websites do exist, the sad fact is that most art is displayed on websites that look cheap and folksy or are so generic that none of the personality of the artist shines through. “Beautiful Websites For Artists” addresses this need by providing cost-effective website design and consulting services specifically geared to the needs of artists.

“Arts professionals want to see that the art looks great, but they also want to get a feel for who the artist is,” commented Daniel Tardent, responsible for new business at BWA. “A well executed website will never replace a physical meeting with a collector, but it can be the key factor that sets the meeting up – and the value of that is priceless. You just can’t get that from any old designer – they have to understand artists and the art industry”

The text on the grey background, below, is taken from Andrew Sullivan's wonderful, award-winning, widely-red blog, The Dish. I am a huge fan of this ex-Brit who now lives in the USA. This is one person's point of view about artist websites, but an interesting one!

From my perspective, as a web programmer, if you really want to see some reliably lousy websites, then look no further than those that artists (painters, sculptors and the like) put up for themselves. They may not have the "discoey" music gaudiness of some restaurant websites, but as far as everything one shouldn't do when making a website goes, they hit all the major notes:

Using a 10 different fonts on one web page? Check.

Having a bunch of broken links on the front page? Check.

Gaudy color schemes (you know, because the website is an "extension of their work")? Check.

Uploading image files that are way too large, thereby causing any visitor to the website to have to wait ten minutes for a page to come up because each work sample is 4 megabytes? Check.

Updating the website once every six years? Check.

Putting their personal Hotmail address on the front page of the website, thereby contributing to the world-wide junk mail scourge (and not to mention making themselves look like a hack)? Check.

Forgetting to pay their web hosting fees, so that half the time their website is "down for maintenance"? Check.

Oh, and this might be the worst ... taking their visitors' emails and including them in large, un-blind-copied show announcement emails? Great big check.

The list goes on, but aside from the bad aesthetic and bad internet manners, they're lousy as customers - a lot of micro-managing, obsessive-compulsive attention to every unimportant detail (I had a woman once call me and complain that a line break was 2 millimeters lower than where it should have been ... she was holding a ruler up to her computer screen), fickleness, and of course the lack of ability to pay for any of the work they've just demanded too much of your time for.

I learned these lessons long ago and don't service many artists anymore. Unless they pay in advance and have a day job.

Graphic Resume

A very visual resumé by graphic designer Katie Briggs‘. “I haven’t been turned down for anything I’ve applied for with this resume,” she said. Story from Neatorama. More visual resumés here.

(Click on the image to see it larger.)

A friend in the media sent me this email publicity she received. She works in television and said in her email to me, "Passing this interview along to you. I find this format really doesn’t do much for me. Poor sound quality bad lighting, not flattering angles. All fodder for you." Besides the written opinion of the video as a promotional tool, the images (captioned at the bottom) did not come through and there are formatting problems that make the announcement feel weak. The errors and problems work against the objective of the communication (the gap in Carolyn's name; the gap in one listing of the gallery name).

This is a smart professional gallery. What was received is surely not what was sent. I post this not to embarrass the gallery or its staff, rather to remind you of the variety of the capabilities of the receiver's systems and software. PDF files always seem to work for me.

Something Fun: Word Clouds

This is a cool site. Go to it, input any words you want, and you get a "word cloud" that you can alter. The image above is what I got by putting in my resumé. I have a pictogram of my professional life.

Pet Peeve AGAIN!

Another example of bad graphic communication. This is a screen shot of an email I received. I use a Mac, as many creative people do, so if my platform is the problem, shame on the creator of this e-ad. This communication works against the best interest of the artist—the critical information is unavailable. (On my computer, if you click on the image above, it opens on a new web page as a larger version.)

Business Cards

Some are 90% design and only 10% customer-friendly information. Some artists don't even have them. Some provide links that are outdated, yet they are what your potential customers have to remember you with. They are your business cards.

Should they be practical and provide basic information, or speak to your creativity by being highly visual and creative? There is a case for both strategies, but think of the purpose of your card and who it is for when you design it. Honestly, what is the point if customers cannot read it?

Hint #1: Remember, customers are not familiar with a lot of our nomenclature and vocabulary, so be careful about your language in all your marketing deliverables, including your business card.

Hint #2: Have a brand and use it forever. (Often your name.)

Hint #3: Help customers remember and understand you (your brand). Have a "qualifier" that assists them. Qualifiers explain your brand.

• John Doe
• John Doe, Artist
• John Doe, Master Printmaker (your medium)
• John Doe, MFA (your degree)
• John Doe, Master Impressionist (your style or marketing niche)
• John Doe, Excellence in Interior Decoration (a sales-oriented qualifier)
• John Doe, JohnDoe.ca (your website, blog, phone number, or studio address, etc.)
• John Doe, [your province or state's] Best Artist (geography)
• John Doe, Featured in the New York Times

Hint #4: Competitive advantage: consider expressing one (those of you seriously into the marketplace). For example, I am a writer. When I started operating a technical writing service, I emphasized my speed saying I was faster than my competitors. My competitors were all about accuracy; I was accurate AND FAST and I moved several clients from competitors to me.

Failed Impressions

Above is what it was supposed to look like. To see it, I had to download it and open it up. (I have only Macs.) Below, is what it looked like embedded in my email. If I weren't interested in visual art marketing, I would not have opened up the attachment and missed the message altogether.

CHECK YOUR WORK, before you send it, my friends.