Messages posted by: AtomicTiki

I'd like to invite any interested artists or lovers of things "TF" to shimmy on down to deviantArt and check out the art jam I'm running.

http://atomictiki.deviantart.com/journal/23531940/

What's is all about you ask?

What are good heroes without good things to fight? Monsters, creatures, things, beasts, robots, demons, oni, whatever! They all add spice to storytelling so let's give our favourite monsters the spotlight or better yet, create some NEW creatures to pit our heroes against, or maybe we'll just take something scary and make it cute, whatever you decide to do it will be fun!

Deadline is Saturday March, 15th

Oh, yes if you do happen to like TF/anthro artwork I have a few a few in my gallery you may enjoy.

Cheers,
AT
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Hello Dragoniade,

I've been a fan and casual visitor of the site for a long time and I was genuinely surprised to see it alive and kicking the other day while I was looking for TF references.

First of all, congratulations on getting the site back up!

Contest?
A site relaunch contest was a great idea though after reading some of the other posts on the forums and reading through the news pages I see a couple of things that perhaps made things difficult or impossible for more people to enter the contest (even though the prizes were great).

Remember, this isn't a dig at you personally these are just things I see as an outsider that could use some tweaking.

Advertising:
It was mentioned before by kylejhall2, but let me elaborate a bit. You really gotta get into peoples' faces, send out personal invitations to artists, get on forums, chans, sites, link networks, social networking tools etc. Again, if it's easy for a lot of people to read your message then you'll get a much larger slice of the art community.

It's a lot of work to advertise things like this and you do have to go out of your way to get people in, especially if you don't have a large number of regular visitors or if you are trying to start something fresh from scratch.

You have to do what it takes to get people in and interested!

Keep it Simple:
After having hosted art jams and contests of my own for a number of years I've found that people respond better to more open challenges. When getting started you want to keep things open, loose and above all fun. Keep the contest description brief and bullet point the rules. Most people when confronted with a wall of text and half a dozen suggestions will either not read it all or feel confined by the examples.

The other big thing is clarity. After reading the news post made on 2009-01-07, my first question was when does the contest end? When did it start? After being unable to find that information I started skimming through the text and I realized the contest was to place your character in a TF situation based on some other media (with plenty of examples). I still had no idea what the contest duration was (and sifting through a backlog of news items is not acceptable).

So, to sum up...
From my perspective as an outsider to your comminuty:

-If I had known about the contest I may have entered
-If the contest rules were clear and concise I would better understand when and what I had to produce
-If the contest was more open I would have been more likely to enter something

Other comments...

I know you aren't that keen on turning the site into a collaborative effort (your site, your rules) but the danger you face by not letting people help contribute content is the site becoming an anachronism. Many moons ago, before there was a YouTube, the best places to find TF video clips and so forth were sites like ShadowlordInc. 7-8 years ago the video quality was passable but the best part was the site was thorough and a person could easily find what they were looking for (I think this is how the majority of people used this site, I know this is how I used to use it). These days there are armies of TF fans posting videos, screen captures and so much more. The content these masses provide are tagged and cross linked by search engines and are very easy to tap into, again not like the old days at all. Granted you don't want to turn the site into yet another FurAffinity but I wonder what is the purpose and the future of the site will be? Who does it serve?

Anyway, good luck with your future projects, and I sincerely hope you can stir up some more interest and get your site back into the swing of things.

Cheers,
AT