All About Art & Artists by D. L. Keur of zentao.com

Zibbet (www.zibbet.com) looks promising. I very much look forward to October, 2008, when they are due to launch.

What is zibbet? Another Australian start-up, but, unlike RedBubble (…which, in my opinion, is one of the very best public artist communities on the Net that couples social networking with art and merchandise sales) zibbet will focus on PROMOTING AND SELLING ART…or so they say.

According to Jonathon Peacock, CEO of Zibbet Pty Ltd, categories will include:

1. Paintings
2. Photography
3. Drawings
4. Mixed Media
5. Digital Art
6. Prints
7. Jewelry
8. Ceramics and Pottery
9. Glass Art
10. Sculptures
11. Other Handmade Items

Features and Benefits will include:

• Member accounts/shops will be FREE.
• Member shop appearance will be fully customizable, with the ability to include a photo, a bio, and even YouTube videos of your choice.
• When a member names their shop, that shop will receive a personalized web address.
• Zibbet will handle all payments on your behalf and will forward you your earning in the first week of every month for the previous months earnings. (Zibbet retains a 20% commission of your asking price.)
• Members will be provided with detailed shop statistics, such as number of visits, number of times each individual item has been viewed, how many people have added a member as a ‘favorite seller’, and how many people have added a member’s item to their ‘wish list’.
• Members will set their own prices, of which zibbet receives their 20% commission.
• Shoppers will have the option to make a private treaty offer for an advertised work which the member can accept, decline, or counter.

Says Jonathon: “We know a thing or 2 about marketing online and offline. Considering our main income is from people SELLING their artwork, driving buyers to the site is our number 1 priority.”

Sounds good to me so far. I guess we’ll see in October.

Comparing two online giclee fine art Print-On-Demand shops for artists and photographers — Finerworks and Imagekind.


THE BASICS

Both Finerworks and Imagekind run on .asp architecture. The difference in their web interfaces is considerable, though. While Imagekind’s seems straight-forward and easy, its failures are notorious. Lots of server failures, thumbnails not showing up, gallery problems, uploader issues, deletion problems (and the resulting copyright infringement issues)…to name the tip of the iceberg, problems which are not addressed in a timely, efficient manner. (See extensive documentation on Imagekind’s forum or ask Revad at www.revad.com, a programmer who has extensive insider knowledge of the flaws and gremlins that persist even today.) Finerworks requires a little more effort from its artists (watch the tutorial). But, so far, for me, (I’m loading big .TIFs) the experience has been flawless, with extremely pleasing results.

Both Imagekind and Finerworks use state-of-the-art Epson printers.

Both Imagekind and Finerworks use museum quality archival substrates.

Imagekind offers framing (farming it out to framing shops for fulfillment); Finerworks doesn’t.

PLUSES AND MINUSES FOR IMAGEKIND

The plus side of Imagekind

• They have a BIG web presence, and it’s going to get bigger since now Cafepress owns them.

• Their print quality is excellent.

• They have a pretty open, uncensored forum for their artists, refreshing in a day when most online enterprises quash any negative member feedback. (How long this will last since Cafepress took ownership remains to be seen.)

The downside of Imagekind:

• You will struggle to get your images printed at sizes you want on the substrates you designate IF you are an artist who likes to control those aspects (I am.). Their “container” sizes are hostile to anything not “standard” and are set in concrete. So, if you want your print exactly this by this in inches/millemeters, plan to put white borders around your work so it prints inside the container sizes, then EMAIL care@imagekind.com and warn them that, yes, you want the PRINT AREA at X by X size.

• Imagekind drop-shipping is specifically designed for Imagekind promotion, and does nothing at all for the artist whose work is being drop-shipped. When Imagekind drop ships, the packages are smothered in Imagekind stickers, customer incentives to purchase more printing and framing from Imagekind (not from you, the artist whose print they shipped), customer incentives to become art sellers themselves at Imagekind, ad infinum, ad nauseum.

• Imagekind promises a lot, but doesn’t quite deliver in the area of artist promotion. A “platinum” or “pro” membership nets you a monthly or yearly bill with no perks except more space. The Platinum or Pro member artist gets no special benefits on their website or a place in Imagekind’s marketing strategies. In fact, Imagekind is big on marketing themselves…to Flickr users and to artists who want to sell prints, not to art buyers. In fact, Imagekind’s main focus seems to be selling themselves to anyone wanting to print and/or sell photos and art. Their focus is not selling prints to art buyers…except, perhaps, their “old masters” and “classical artists” print run remainders.

• Imagekind’s website design seems specifically tailored to try to siphon off an artist’s customers during the shopping and purchase fulfillment process.

• Imagekind’s shopping cart is not exactly user-friendly.

• Imagekind’s search engine is, plain and simple, B-A-D…but, then, Finerworks doesn’t have one, so…no comparison.

• Some of Imagekind’s advertising is misleading…to both buyers and sellers.

• Imagekind is big on marketing themselves through their artists, but not good at reciprocating. “No follow” is their rule for off-site links leading to an artist’s personal website…which is totally bogus because the major search engine’s no follow rule only applies to paid-for advertising. So Imagekind is doing the no-follow strictly as a self-serving function to the detriment of their artist members. In other words, everything can point to Imagekind, but Imagekind won’t point to an artist member, contributing to that member artist’s web presence. Reciprocal linking is specifically denied in Imagekind’s web programming.

PLUSES AND MINUSES FOR FINERWORKS

The plus marks for Finerworks are:

• Excellent print quality.

• Artists have complete print size and substrate control. Your art is printed at the size you choose and at the DPI you set, not resized to fit convenient “containers.”

• White label drop shipping from Finerworks is good for the artst: When Finerworks drop ships, the works look like they come directly from the artist, not from Finerworks.

• Finerworks doesn’t attempt to siphon off your customer to other products and artists like Imagekind does.

• Finerworks DOES NOT SELL “classics.” In other words, at Finerworks, unlike Imagekind, you aren’t competing with cheap remainders of Van Gogh, Degas, Ansel Adams, Warhol, Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, Dali…sold at clearance sale prices from big art publisher syndicates.

• Your personal Finerworks‘ website and gallery is your own, not a cluttered page of branded advertising for the venue.

The down side:

• There is no real way of finding an artist and their work on Finerworks…except to laboriously click through the members listings, page by page. No search engine to speak of…but, then, Imagekind’s search engine is a notorious DOG, so they both fail there.
• Finerworks doesn’t have the big “face” or “presence.” It isn’t well known…yet. Instead of 50,000 artists, it only has a couple of hundred members. I hope that changes. I think Finerworks provides things in ways Imagekind doesn’t, and Imagekind provides things Finerworks doesn’t.

While I presently use them both, I look forward to seeing each becoming better and better. Each could be leaders in the online art world to benefit both artists and art buyers.

RedBubble: Superior at greeting cards (and I mean it.) Heavy stock, color matching is perfect, alignment is impeccable, fold is done to perfection, neither breaking the paper, nor crooked, nor not creased enough. On a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 as best, they rank a 10.

RedBubble is also good at t-shirts…IF the art is designed for inkjet printing. Now, occasionally, there’s a misprint, but RedBubble is quick to fix it…and you don’t have to ship back your faulty tee. Just take a digital snapshot and send to to them, and in a couple of days a replacement, guaranteed to be right, is winging its way to you pronto.

Spreadshirt.com, hands down, is one of the premier t-shirt PODS. But, again, it always is dependent upon how canny the artist is.

Calendars: I really like Zazzle’s calendars. The printing is good, the paper is heavy enough, and I’ve never had any problems with their color match…and some of my prints are TOUGH to print!

Art books: Blurb.com is my choice, right now, though there are a few problems here and there. LuLu has a nice “photobook,” but it’s S-M-A-L-L. Blurb offers a coffee table book size that’s “coffee table” sized. I still prefer a private publishers, but, hey, for POD, and hands-off sales, this is a good compromise.

Fine art prints: Imagekind. There’s also Finerworks.com. And there are a couple others that print good products. I’m not going to go into more detail than that, because each has its strengths and weaknesses as a POD and/or a web presence. Combining their good points would make a super POD, but that has yet to happen.

Dawn

Coming back after six months down time used to get well (well, almost, anyway), I moved the art reviews blog from NakedGenius over to zentao to its now permanent home. But I needed to re-skin it to match. First, though, I had to:

• catch up over at NakedGenius on the ACC art and artists forum,
• get the NG book done,
• start a weekly art magazine

…before I had space to customize the theme, fix all the links and adjust the calls, and, generally get it updated. I’m not quite done, yet, but we’re close enough to announce that art reviews will again be a regular feature here.

Omigod, it’s S-E-C-R-E-T. Omigod, it’s a CLOSED GROUP, a SECRET SOCIETY.

Ah, yes, it is, whether it’s artmesh.org, or NakedGenius.com’s Artist Collaboration Community (ACC), or any number of other private groups on the Net.

One self-declared leading lady (the one I call ‘Ms. Snits’) has, oh, so much to say regarding anything “secret,” but the plain facts are that

• the best deals are made in private (called “private treaty”),
• and the best groups are those which screen their membership to include only those who have a serious commitment to their art and respect others for theirs.

Oddly, the “secret,” private groups demonstrate much less cliquishness and much more democratic character than do the open ones…probably because they can TRUST their members, members who know that, should they violate that trust, they lose their membership, not so much for being themselves and speaking their mind, but rather by being “catty,” dishonorable, or unethical.