Chirstie McBride

Name / Team member names: Chirstie McBride

Working title: Online commissions centre

Blog URL: https://projectblog.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

What is the intended idea / concept behind the proposed project?

A centralised placed where artists can advertise their skills in order to get commission work.

For commissioners the site will act as a market of sort, where they can browse different artists, see reviews of their work and standard prices.For artists the site will act as a safe place to advertise their work without fear of art theft. Also for a small subscription fee, the site will act as an artist’s union; a place where your rights as creators are protected. This means for example that solicitors could be hired to fight your cases of copyright infringement. This will hopefully stop big corporations from stealing work for small artists and gaining profits off of it.

Justify the idea / concept in terms of the needs for its existence (if purely for entertainment, state this and how the output will be innovative/original and creative):

There is no union that supports and protects artists. Normally artists rely on patrons to survive, but this website will revolutionise the career. Also it will make it more accessible for art enthusiast to commission artists and see upfront how much different art costs. This might also foster a bigger appreciation for digital artists if people understood how long their art took and how much that time is worth.

Describe the intended audience:

Artists who self publish and advertise online. Art enthusiasts and those who would be interested in commissioning art for business/self.

How will this project extend your or your team’s creative and technical skills?

This Project will extend on my designing skills as I want to create a usable mock up of the website using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe XD. It will also improve further on my motion graphic skills as I want to create an advert/promotional video explaining the website.

Outline how the practical work will be carried out by you / the team (division of labour) and the time-scales involved for each task:

Conceptual website and brand design with feedback and improvements : 2-3 weeks

Building website mock up with bracing evident throughout: 3 weeks

Promotional Video: 1 week

What other work (by animators, designers, film-makers, writers, digital media producers, etc.) is relevant to your project? (This work may either be relevant for its conceptual or technical similarity):

The websites: Etsy, Deviant Art, Tumblr and Patreon

List any critical texts that are relevant to your conceptual intentions:

Any other information not covered above:

Need the design of my product to be professional looking so as to feel reliable but at the same time the indented audience is artists so it also needs to be stylistic and pleasing to look at.

In this session it was pointed out to me that not every young artist might be able to afford the subscription fee for the website. Or they might not have access to a bank account. For this issue it was preposed that I enable patrons of artists to pay the subscription fee in some cases. This would make my site more accessible to a wider audience.

It was also preposed that instead of having a subscription fee to my website, instead I took a percentage per art sold from the artists. However there are a few reasons I am against this idea:

• If the artist is not consistently selling well then they don’t bring enough money to the website, this means that the everyone protecting each other plan doesn’t work. Instead the most popular artists will be covering everyones legal fees. A subscription fee is farer in the long run
• If the website takes a percentage of the profits from an image then it might foster the belief that the website claims ownership over the art, which is against the very ideals that formed this project.
• Artists might be tempted to mark up their prices to cover the money taken by the website, this would then be unfair to the customers who expect a fair and accurate price for what they’re asking for.