Post by dave! on Mar 5, 2007 11:20:30 GMT -5
Hello, SequA!
March 2nd's meeting was an excellent presentation by Krishna Sadasivam, our sponsor here at Art Institute of Tampa, and author of the popular online webcomic PCWeenies.com.
The presentation was primarily about marketing our work as artists, with a sub-topic about methods to attract a fan-base online.
Blogs are a recommended marketing tool – www.blogger.com is a great resource with easy-to- use blogging tools, and it's a fast way to establish a free domain. Prez Wallace pointed out, if you use the tagging tool for each blog entry, it indexes your content to the vast audience that scans through blogger and blogspot, and that'll bring a large audience to your work.
Other free sites:
•Use the free gallery tools at www.deviantart.com to create a digital portfolio. Free registration.
•Use the free gallery tools at www.comicspace.com, a comic book variant of myspace (and not affiliated with myspace, but that's a good thing). There are over 13,000 registered users, many of whom are comic book professionals. Free registration.
•A unique set of gallery tools is at www.flickr.com. I personally recommend that you take advantage of every free gallery resource, as each website has a different community of users, and it'll put you in touch with more fans and peers than any one gallery can. Free registration.
•Free registration at the forum www.drawingboard.org is useful; there are a number of animation and comic book and illustration professionals who post new work there, and there is a polite informal critique circle available to you as an aspiring professional. The forum will gladly accept invitations to critique your posted work.
•www.conceptart.org was recommended by Mike; I don't know much about it, but I read online:
“Welcome to Conceptart.org.
We are a web community of artists who are here for one purpose. We want to help each other learn about art, provide the best place to showcase work, further our art educations, and to meet other artists from around the world.
We are a community funded from within, and with the support of our sponsors and professionals on the site.”
•www.cgsociety.org offers the work of many digital artists, both aspiring and professional; it was mentioned there are 2D and 3D art contests there, plus forums to interact about art posted.
•Kazu Kibishi's www.boltcity.com is a good resource for a fellow aspiring professional (he writes quite a lot about his art process), but it's also a portal to www.flightcomics.com/forum/ which is similar to drawingboard.org's forums; published professionals will offer critiques of posted work. Plus, it's frequented by a lot of awesome artists including the Flight Anthologies group. Free registration.
Krishna covered other guerrilla marketing tools that require a little bit of money and time:
Buy your own web domain.
Usually only a little bit of money per year, and you're going to need one very soon anyways as graphics professionals. Take control of it now so that by the time you graduate, you've developed a great website of your own.
Sites you can search and register your new web domain:
www.whois.com
www.nameboy.com
www.godaddy.com
Sites you can host a new web domain:
www.godaddy.com
www.lunarpages.com
www.mediatemple.net (very artist and designer-friendly web hosts)
Take classes at AI-Tampa like “Intro to Scripting” which can teach you the HTML language you need to know to maintain a website of your own.
Business cards are in every guerrilla entrepreneurs' arsenal (that's you, aspiring professionals: guerrilla entrepreneurs). A site recommended for inexpensive business card printing was www.greatfxbusinesscards.com. Info that you should include on your card:
Your name
Your title (Studio Owner, Media Specialist, Animator, etc.)
Phone number/s
E-mail address
Website URL
Tips: make your card look interesting without costing yourself a bundle! Some artists display a faint grayscale closeup of one of their sample illustrations in the background of their card. Some artists develop an icon for their name or studio name. Some artists, if they choose the extra expense, may use the flip side of their card for a full-color or b&w display of an illustration.
At the bare minimum, choose easily-read text for all your information. Fancy fonts are fun, but if the letters are too distressed to be read, you've lost the point of the card – to transmit your contact information to a potential client. Make yourself easy to reach first, then show off your skills later when you're both in touch!
Print On Demand services (also known as POD)
These are useful for printing small runs of material that you want to leave behind with clients to demonstrate your skills, and it's also great for publishing stories in their target format to show around at comic book conventions; seeing a published book is often a lead-in to getting you other work, or having the stories shown re-published elsewhere. We collated a set of POD services online:
www.ka-blam.com/
www.lulu.com/
www.comixpress.com/
www.printondemand.com/ (an overall aggregate site about print on demand)
Get the word out about you!
Online, you can do this as part of your signature anytime you post in a forum, including your website or weblog just beneath your name. Frequent forums with interests similar to your own; you want to be a 3D artist, join a few 3D and Computer Graphics forums and post there. But always find a way to display your website link leading people back to your personal galleries. I even have that link in my e-mail signature.
Find out who's looking at you!
Krishna showed us www.alexa.com as a way to monitor the traffic and web-ranks of your site. On your site, you can also invite readers to comment or post mail to you. If you feel a little vulnerable about releasing personal information, don't give a valued e-mail address away, but create a new one at gmail or yahoo to give away at your weblog or website.
www.technorati.com also has a bunch of tools to analyze your weblog's webrank.
Generate a little money for yourself!
Two ways Krishna mentioned: add code from www.projectwonderful.com to your website (it may even be possible to add it to your blog...) to get small ads others pay to run on your site.
And those POD books, while not a huge money-earner, if applied steadily and carefully, could get you a little money over time. While POD is primarily useful as a marketing tool, if someone happens to have enough interest in your work, it is possible you could earn a little on books sold at conventions and shows.
Part meeting minutes, part advice: that's March 2nd's meeting minutes by me, your humble secretary, Dave Lanphear. Catch you next meeting!!
March 2nd's meeting was an excellent presentation by Krishna Sadasivam, our sponsor here at Art Institute of Tampa, and author of the popular online webcomic PCWeenies.com.
The presentation was primarily about marketing our work as artists, with a sub-topic about methods to attract a fan-base online.
Blogs are a recommended marketing tool – www.blogger.com is a great resource with easy-to- use blogging tools, and it's a fast way to establish a free domain. Prez Wallace pointed out, if you use the tagging tool for each blog entry, it indexes your content to the vast audience that scans through blogger and blogspot, and that'll bring a large audience to your work.
Other free sites:
•Use the free gallery tools at www.deviantart.com to create a digital portfolio. Free registration.
•Use the free gallery tools at www.comicspace.com, a comic book variant of myspace (and not affiliated with myspace, but that's a good thing). There are over 13,000 registered users, many of whom are comic book professionals. Free registration.
•A unique set of gallery tools is at www.flickr.com. I personally recommend that you take advantage of every free gallery resource, as each website has a different community of users, and it'll put you in touch with more fans and peers than any one gallery can. Free registration.
•Free registration at the forum www.drawingboard.org is useful; there are a number of animation and comic book and illustration professionals who post new work there, and there is a polite informal critique circle available to you as an aspiring professional. The forum will gladly accept invitations to critique your posted work.
•www.conceptart.org was recommended by Mike; I don't know much about it, but I read online:
“Welcome to Conceptart.org.
We are a web community of artists who are here for one purpose. We want to help each other learn about art, provide the best place to showcase work, further our art educations, and to meet other artists from around the world.
We are a community funded from within, and with the support of our sponsors and professionals on the site.”
•www.cgsociety.org offers the work of many digital artists, both aspiring and professional; it was mentioned there are 2D and 3D art contests there, plus forums to interact about art posted.
•Kazu Kibishi's www.boltcity.com is a good resource for a fellow aspiring professional (he writes quite a lot about his art process), but it's also a portal to www.flightcomics.com/forum/ which is similar to drawingboard.org's forums; published professionals will offer critiques of posted work. Plus, it's frequented by a lot of awesome artists including the Flight Anthologies group. Free registration.
Krishna covered other guerrilla marketing tools that require a little bit of money and time:
Buy your own web domain.
Usually only a little bit of money per year, and you're going to need one very soon anyways as graphics professionals. Take control of it now so that by the time you graduate, you've developed a great website of your own.
Sites you can search and register your new web domain:
www.whois.com
www.nameboy.com
www.godaddy.com
Sites you can host a new web domain:
www.godaddy.com
www.lunarpages.com
www.mediatemple.net (very artist and designer-friendly web hosts)
Take classes at AI-Tampa like “Intro to Scripting” which can teach you the HTML language you need to know to maintain a website of your own.
Business cards are in every guerrilla entrepreneurs' arsenal (that's you, aspiring professionals: guerrilla entrepreneurs). A site recommended for inexpensive business card printing was www.greatfxbusinesscards.com. Info that you should include on your card:
Your name
Your title (Studio Owner, Media Specialist, Animator, etc.)
Phone number/s
E-mail address
Website URL
Tips: make your card look interesting without costing yourself a bundle! Some artists display a faint grayscale closeup of one of their sample illustrations in the background of their card. Some artists develop an icon for their name or studio name. Some artists, if they choose the extra expense, may use the flip side of their card for a full-color or b&w display of an illustration.
At the bare minimum, choose easily-read text for all your information. Fancy fonts are fun, but if the letters are too distressed to be read, you've lost the point of the card – to transmit your contact information to a potential client. Make yourself easy to reach first, then show off your skills later when you're both in touch!
Print On Demand services (also known as POD)
These are useful for printing small runs of material that you want to leave behind with clients to demonstrate your skills, and it's also great for publishing stories in their target format to show around at comic book conventions; seeing a published book is often a lead-in to getting you other work, or having the stories shown re-published elsewhere. We collated a set of POD services online:
www.ka-blam.com/
www.lulu.com/
www.comixpress.com/
www.printondemand.com/ (an overall aggregate site about print on demand)
Get the word out about you!
Online, you can do this as part of your signature anytime you post in a forum, including your website or weblog just beneath your name. Frequent forums with interests similar to your own; you want to be a 3D artist, join a few 3D and Computer Graphics forums and post there. But always find a way to display your website link leading people back to your personal galleries. I even have that link in my e-mail signature.
Find out who's looking at you!
Krishna showed us www.alexa.com as a way to monitor the traffic and web-ranks of your site. On your site, you can also invite readers to comment or post mail to you. If you feel a little vulnerable about releasing personal information, don't give a valued e-mail address away, but create a new one at gmail or yahoo to give away at your weblog or website.
www.technorati.com also has a bunch of tools to analyze your weblog's webrank.
Generate a little money for yourself!
Two ways Krishna mentioned: add code from www.projectwonderful.com to your website (it may even be possible to add it to your blog...) to get small ads others pay to run on your site.
And those POD books, while not a huge money-earner, if applied steadily and carefully, could get you a little money over time. While POD is primarily useful as a marketing tool, if someone happens to have enough interest in your work, it is possible you could earn a little on books sold at conventions and shows.
Part meeting minutes, part advice: that's March 2nd's meeting minutes by me, your humble secretary, Dave Lanphear. Catch you next meeting!!
