DeviantArt Review: The Social Art Hub for Art Lovers
Visit DeviantArt on the web at http://deviantart.com/
DeviantArt is an online platform that has been created to inspire, entertain and ultimately empower artists to continue creating works of art worth sharing to the world. It is a community of emerging and established artists, a home for the exhibition and promotion of works within a peer community that’s dedicated to the arts.
Background History
DeviantArt first started out as a site that only connected people who had a fascination for computer applications and modified these to suit their own taste and preferences. These are people who “deviate” applications from their original designs. The site grew over time and members eventually came to be known as “deviants” and their submissions, “deviations”.
In the year 2000, the site was officially launched and became part of Dmusic Network which was a bigger network of music-related websites. Later on, it flourished even more due to the unique offerings and contributions of its volunteers and members. The site was inspired loosely by projects such as deskmod.com, customize.org, Winamp facelift, skinz.org and screenphuck.com.
Today, DeviantArt remains the largest online social network for art enthusiasts and artists. It has over 29 million registered members and has over 65 million visitors every month.
What’s so cool about it?
At DeviantArt, visitors and members get to explore hundreds of millions of unique, original art works. And if that’s not cool enough, you can even submit your own artwork and have it exhibited to an art appreciative audience of more than 29 million people FOR FREE! All it takes is setting up a profile, creating a gallery and then you can move on to building your own fan base!
Easily sign up for free
As a community, DeviantArt allows its members to communicate, learn from and collaborate with artists from all over the world. They provide a great opportunity for art enthusiasts to grow and master their own crafts. What’s more is that they also give members the chance to establish themselves and sell their artworks in the DeviantArt Shop.
Features
- Easy browsing through categories
DeviantArt has artworks classified under different categories. There’s digital art, photography, traditional art, film & animation, contests, literature and designs or interfaces. Works may also be searched for by style, artist or keywords.
Quickly navigate using categories
- Art Submission
At DeviantArt, you can upload an unlimited number of your artworks for free. It’s a great way to build your own audience, create a professional portfolio for potential employers or clients and get feedback from other art lovers and artists!
Easily submit your artwork
- Profile Creation
Create your own profile to introduce yourself to the community, track your pageview stats, attract a fan base and even write entries in your journal. The profile incorporates a user friendly and full featured interface that keeps you fully interconnected to every element of the entire site.
Create your unique profile in minutes
- Community
DeviantArt encourages its members to engage with fellow artists by allowing posting of comments on profile pages and artwork submissions. Instant updates may be retrieved through the deviantWATCH tool and private messaging is made possible with the Message Center. Art contests are also abundant in deviantArt with prizes typically ranging from computer software programs to cars.
Give and receive comments
- The DeviantArt Shop
DeviantArt may also be an online platform where members can sell posters, prints and canvasses of their own works to people from anywhere in the world.
This is made possible through the DeviantArt Shop. The Prints service also allows members to effortlessly make money by letting them handle all the framing, printing, shipping and dealing of artwork sales.
Art shop for E-commerce of Artworks
- The DeviantArt Channels
DeviantArt channels give you a quick and easy way to stay abreast of submitted artworks. To enhance the effectiveness the channels are grouped into newest, popular and daily deviations. The channels can also be customized to suit your unique needs. Interesting channels can also be browsed to reveal additional content.
Follow your interests with channels
- The DeviantArt Groups
DeviantArt groups give you a way to connect with the types of art that most interest you. For instance, if your thing is anime you can quickly find a group that is full of anime art and anime enthusiasts. You can also create a new group and start your own thing. There are also groups that are focused on helping others to learn about artwork and these can be of great benefit for any aspiring artist.
Create and/or join groups of interest
- The DeviantArt Journal Portal
The DeviantArt Journal Portal is essentially like a discussion board where you have a steady flow of journal entries from the community. You can read through the journals and comment on them as well. This is a great atmosphere to discuss topics of interests and to get involved and connected with other members.
Read through interesting journal entries
- DeviantArt Advertising Opportunities
DeviantArt boasts a ton of advertising opportunities that are very enticing. Especially if your product or service is art or somehow related to the art industry. For starters, 65 million unique world-wide site visitors is strong reason to consider advertising here.
You can also take advantage of very precise ad targeting here by making use of Deviant’s Ad Sniper technology. If you are still skeptical we would recommend that you at least give some credit for the fact that Dodge, Dark Shadows, Sony, Dr. Pepper and Gears of War 3 all made use of this platform for very serious advertising campaigns.
Impressive advertising opportunities
- DeviantArt Video Tour
If all of this has still not convinced you to jump on the DeviantArt bandwagon we would suggest that you take a few moments to go and watch their video tour. It just may give you the little nudge that you are needing.
Take a video tour of Deviant Art
Predicted Future Trends
As art is a flourishing medium and with the internet community continuously growing by the day, DeviantArt is expected to progress further and into far greater heights. Even big companies are now using DeviantArt as a means of promoting and advertising themselves.
In 2012, Dodge and CoolClimate hosted contests on the site and received thousands of submissions in response. In 2013, Lexus partnered with DeviantArt to run a competition based on their new Lexus IS design. DeviantArt has also hosted numerous contests for movies and video games through 2013 and the numbers for partnerships are only expected to continue to rise in the coming years.
Conclusion
If you are an artist or just somebody who loves art this can be a very beneficial social network for you. If you are an artist you can display and even sell your wares here.
If you want to learn there are plenty of opportunities for that. If you simply enjoy viewing art and would like to be a part of a vibrant art enthusiast community this is a great place to be.
Visit DeviantArt on the web at http://deviantart.com
You are also invited to visit and connect with us at Deviantart at http://impactsocialmedia.deviantart.com/