Some kind of "community gallery"?
3yr
Yiming Wu
Making a community gallery page where it shows randomly some art from users of the site, and navigates to their profile. No fancy filtering or popular ordering or anything like that, just to get people interested in what others are up to?
Also I posted this artist webring idea earlier in the artist lounge, I think proko would be in the best place to host something like this in the modern age: https://www.proko.com/community/topics/artist-webring
3yr
I've been thinking more on this and it poses a good question for this site. Is there desire from the Proko crew for this site to provide functionality like ArtStation/DeviantArt where users can browse portfolios and showcase posted artwork, or will it remain learning-focused only (it's not referred to on the roadmap currently)?
I ask because if Proko expands into the gallery 'showcasing' features, that would be exciting and I'd look forward to doing that building out of the community and instructors providing good critique (instead of just posts with "oh wow, so awesome" as Artstation etc tend to go).
If not, are we encouraged to mostly post course related work, or should we have functionality to link off to Artstation/Instagram/Flickr/DeviantArt, etc?
I'd much prefer the former :)
I'm trying to think how that also integrates into the learning and community experience and have a few ideas:
- Galleries/portfolios are gouped by courses
- Galleries/portfolios are gouped by community groups (either pre-defined or user created)
- Each user has a 'Public' album where they can post art to show in the 'showcase' main gallery
- Galleries/portfolios grouped by media
- Galleries/portfolios grouped by experience level
It might make sense for this site to be somewhat restrictive with it to maintain the learning, critique and interaction angle rather than self-promotion, which I think would also be better, leave the self-promotion and advertising to the other sites.
This might also have the advantage of better tying critique-request posts to user's profiles and area of focus, but maybe not.
Yiming Wu
3yr
Yeah generally I think if we have too much of this kind of function it may dilute the community purpose. But let's leave it there and let proko team figure out what's best... I still think studying group kind of support would be awesome!
3yr
I agree with a lot of what you said here. I think they have to be careful to maintain a distinction between themselves and other webhosting/gallery sites. Not just to maintain the community, but so that people who come to the site for the first time don't dismiss it thinking that they already have an ArtStation/DeviantArt account.
At the moment, it's rather interesting twist on other art communities. Here there are moments where I may simply be discussing a topic with someone (such as yourself) and then go check out their artwork. While on other sites whether you engage with artists is largely decided by whether their art caught your eye or not within the sea of new posts. Right now my interest fellow travelers on this site is determined as much by their engagement in the community, goals and willingness to learn as it is by my thoughts on the art they have shared.
3yr
I was thinking about this the other day as well. It would be really cool to be able to browse what people are putting out there, without having to go through all the different forum sections. Not to mention, if people are just posting things to their profiles we'll only find out about them if we are already there.
I wondered if they had left it out intentionally because they thought that it might take away from the community feel there were going for, or at least they weren't sure how it would affect it. Currently, the different forums feel almost like classrooms and help to foster lots of discussion. Perhaps they wanted to focus on this niche before expanding with features that other platforms (Artstation, Deviantart, Instagram, etc) already have covered. That's all speculation though, it may have just not been a priority.
Personally, though I like the idea. Especially the part about leaving out filters/popularity so that everyone has a chance to be seen. That seems more in line with the school/classroom feel; like Art lining the hallway.
3yr
I think so as well... Then the gallery might become a showcase thing where it's not very much helpful.
To make community concept better, we might want to have some study group thing in the community where you can organize private groups of people who are interested in same stuff as you do.
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