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creya screenshots, part un

November 28, 2009
By venksster in concept

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artist_gallery

artist personal gallery,
contains the ability to filter photographs by exif data as well as tags, names or genre.

artist_shoeboxes

artist personal shoeboxes,
are really dynamic sets, created from the filters on the gallery page.
so you could create a shoebox of say, ISO 400, which means that you now have a dynamic set that would populate all your current AND future photographs that conform to the exif, ISO=400.
the same theory can be applied to tags as well, which i believe would be the more popular use-case.


photo

artist photo,
we’ve kept the room dark, unless you happen to rollover the main navigation.
no distractions, just photo.
one can ’submit the photo for review’, which means it would be posted in the community section and open to review. this is really the most interesting part about creya; i’ll go into more detail about this in my next post.

the startup, a year later…

November 27, 2009
By venksster in concept

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no we haven’t fallen off the face of the earth.  the last thirteen months have been quite grueling but a LOT of fun! i should’ve blogged more often but i guess i just didn’t have the time, emotionally, to get a zoomed-out perspective of things.

a quick recap…

todd finished designing the front end stuff by mid february ‘09. it took us about half a month to officially wrap up the project with him and complete the knowledge transfer. in the meanwhile, we were about 35% into the server-side code. we were looking good, or so we thought.

another month passed by. it was april. as we sat to integrate the frontend with our code and play around with it, we realized that something was amiss. it wasn’t anything to do with todd; he’d done a fantastic job with the spec and our directions but we didn’t quite get it right. we just didn’t hit the mark. it didn’t cater to the kind of audience we were looking to target. it was getting into a certain photo-sharing mode rather than a photography critique and feedback platform. we couldn’t put our finger on it but we knew we had screwed up.

i decided to play around and change one page. i started off with a darker theme. one page led to another page, to another page, the navigation and before i knew it, i was pretty much redoing everything from scratch barring a few sections. and i started having fun doing it so i just went with the flow.  it was many many months before something stable could emerge. in the meanwhile, pg worked on getting the uploads and the crop working and we were back on track.

yet, there were so many moving parts that there seemed no end to this. we could only work about two hours on weekdays and two days on the weekend. it was a slow process. by october, i realized that there is indeed no end to this. we could either go on forever or set ourselves a hard date. we decided that we HAD to release in december. it doesn’t matter if it was an alpha build. something, anything! and i think we will stick to that.

the plan is to release an alpha build sometime next month, technically in 2009 and take it from there.

expect more details about the app and some screenshots in my next post!

asking the experts

November 1, 2008
By venksster in concept, contacts and people, social dynamics

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woww, i haven’t written for more than a month! a lot has happened since, without writing a single line of code.

we emailed (ok spammed) various well established photographers and photography professors across the city(SVA,NYU,Parsons,etc). we wanted their opinion on the project and also some suggestions of ‘how to translate an offline traditional critique process to an online space’. the replies were interesting. while some derided the idea as foolish, some were a bit more helpful in giving us a few pointers. the NYU Tisch school of the arts said they’d discuss it amongst themselves and get back to us.

Joe Sinnott from Channel 13, also a visiting professor at SVA, was kind enough to meet up with us for a few hours. he is one of those guys who talks straight, not to mention that he is allergic to bullshit :). you can never be bored around him. he gave us some very interesting pointers and takes on people’s habits in an online space. all in all, it was very useful and we’re grateful to him for having taken the time out for us.

in the meanwhile, vj had to leave the team due to some personal reasons. he had a few other things that required his immediate attention. it was a big loss for us. me and pg brainstormed on ways to fill the void.

Kunal’s name came up. we met with him. he loved the idea and where we were going with it. he is one of those geeks and brings a good perspective to the team. welcome aboard,Kunal!

the whole of october was Ideation;creating a spec for Todd that would enable him to get started on the photoshop mockups. it was a very long drawn process but totally worth it. we gave Todd the spec about a week ago and he’s already making good progress.

a survey: what do YOU think?

September 27, 2008
By venksster in social dynamics, target audience

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we sent out a survey to find out if people actually agreed with us.

1. Where do you post your artwork on the Internet?
survey_31

2. On the site, are you getting a satisfactory amount of constructive feedback about your artwork from serious discerning artists?
survey_4

well, based on just 70 responses, it is hard to say if these numbers should be taken very seriously, but it gives us enough indication that we weren’t totally off the mark. I think a survey may or may not tell you if you’re on the right track but it can certainly tell if you’re on the wrong one.

evaluating the usual suspects; flickr,behance,etc

September 24, 2008
By venksster in case study, concept

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flickr:

it has provision for ‘comments’ at the bottom. typical feedback include  ‘nice pic’, ‘amazing’, ‘lovely DoF’, amongst other trite comments. Now, mind you, I am not criticizing flickr. They provide exactly what they promise and I love them. they don’t provide any rating schemes. I guess they don’t want your new year booze party pic rated higher than a pic of you with your grandparents. Its apples and oranges. rating one over the other doesn’t make sense.
courtesy: larajade@flickr

behance:

they have ‘comments’ too. But they also have an ‘appreciate’ button with an obvious use case: it let’s you know how many artists liked your artwork. However, that doesn’t tell you anything about how you could do better. Again, behance is awesome with respect to what it promises: market yourself to the high paying discerning audience. And it does this very well.
courtesy: onthetable@behance

artbistro:

i have to say I’m a bit confused about their mission statement. what exactly is it that they wish to do? there are so many options from jobs to shops to education. its quite overwhelming. whatever it be, it also contains the ‘comments’ section. however, it does have a binary rating scheme of like/dislike. so it tells you that your artwork is disliked. so far so good. but it doesn’t tell you why, or what you could’ve done better.
courtesy: anthem@artbistro

deviantArt and others:
they fall in more or less one of the above templates.

So right now,
atmost, an artist would know that people are not necessrily crazy about a particular artwork of his/hers; but s/he wouldn’t really know why, unless they leave him some meaningful comments.

the design

September 24, 2008
By venksster in social dynamics

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if one were to work serially, i guess a startup would take a couple of years to see the light of day. Women can certainly parallel process better than men. do they make for better managers? i don’t know.

while i was discussing my previous idea, ‘trade for portfolio’ with prash, i had gotten into trying to design the front end myself. that idea stemmed from my own pain from the inability to find complementing artists near my area for photo shoots. make up artists, body art specialists, models, stylists, there should be a site where they all meet up. well again, meetup.com is great but it doesn’t mash well for this purpose.

so, the almighty photoshop cs3 at my aid, i pegged away night after night, only to be disgusted with the results. i must’ve had about four iterations of starting from scratch before i ended up with something which was definitely ‘decent’. but ‘decent’ just doesn’t cut it. at the end of the day, i created something better than orkut or art bistro or deviant Art, but well, is that a benchmark??

well anyway, that idea was abandoned to accommodate Creya, but what i did learn was that its not really a good idea to try and do everything yourself. you might be better than average but its much better to let the pros do what they do best. yes, it might cost some money, but its worth it! especially at the early stages of a startup, the last thing i wanted to do was get too focused in just one area, spending time in researching how to use the trace tool in illustrator rather than looking at the big pic.

we needed a designer. we needed someone who was, of course good, but more importantly someone who’s sensibilities complemented the kind of demographic that we were targeting. we are targeting artists, people who are very good at what they do. an amazingly well designed web 2.0 site out there catering to the general audience, may not work when you try to cater to a select audience. dear friend Craislist to the rescue. in two days, i got about 200 portfolios to look at. talk about graphic designers in manhattan. i can safely say that about 190+ of them were absolute crap. about 5+ of them were excellent but their sensibilities didn’t complement the project.

finally, enter todd.

http://toddham.com

his portfolio was good. but more importantly, when i saw the customization of his wordpress blog, i realized that he fit the bill. he can totally setup a professional, minimalistic and yet compelling model that would appeal to the discerning artist.

we met him. he was smart and asked the right questions. he went through the outline spec i sent him and came up with current websites that had the look and feel that we are looking for. he himself, was no stranger to startups. he co-created http://golark.com

todd was the guy.

the startup team

September 24, 2008
By venksster in concept, social dynamics

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once i decided that there was a marketplace for this, i knew i needed a team. this was no one man show. i had already vetted pg with my earlier concept of ‘trade for portfolio’. i met prash and vj at our regular coffeehouse and introduced this massively untapped market.

its hard to be amused about a concept called ‘critique’. its also hard to accept that we would be catering, not to the mass audience at large, but to a select, albeit large, group of people. its hard to accept that we would be competing with flickr and behance. but the truth is, we weren’t. flickr, behance, art bistro and the likes are mostly art and artists’ marketing tools, while Creya was going to be an art feedback tool, a community; not a social networking app, but a community. it really depends on how you look at it. the ability to upload your pics to Creya doesn’t make it flickr. it depends on the treatment, the objective, the philosophy, the audience.

they had their doubts, and it was natural. amateurs ourselves, it seemed rather impetuous to take on a field like this. a very small part of me, too was with them. but a quick research on the web dispelled all fears. there are literally thousands and thousands of ‘groups’ in flickr, deviant Art, etc dedicated to art critique, and all of them are trying to hack the system to create this. a quick flickr search reveals,

http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=critique
“We found 1,283 groups about critique.”

the average number of members in each group is about 400. The top ones have 4000.

clearly, flickr is not designed for art feedback. it caters to a ‘family audience’. its very easy for them to mash up a rating system but they don’t want to. they want to keep it clean. its a philosophy thing. the same with deviant Art; it caters to artists but it wants to be more mainstream. critique is a muddy and ambitious path and no one wants to tread it.

vj brings in web development experience and an open mind. prash brings in some discipline and he’s recently bought three new lenses, so he’s definitely getting into the mood of things. the team is good.