Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

devi­antART: One Toke Over the Line

The art com­munity web­site devi­antART, with whom I’ve hos­ted my online pho­to­graphy port­fo­lio for over 18 months, has been through some ups and downs in the time I’ve been on-board. The recent trend has been for the artists to take a back seat to money-making, and I have put up with this as I didn’t think it was that much of a prob­lem. My pho­tos were still get­ting viewed, cri­tiqued and pub­li­cised, and that was fine.

Today I am angry. A few weeks ago the techs at dA caved in to pub­lic pres­sure and released their much-lauded “v5”, a fairly com­plete over­haul of the present­a­tion side of the site. Unfortunately they made the fatal mis­take of not wait­ing until the fuck­ing product was com­plete before they pub­lished it. Thus, a whole bunch of stuff on the site was broken or looked bad for some time until they got around to com­plet­ing those bits. This, it seems, is still ongo­ing, with many issues remain­ing unfixed.

Beyond the “reg­u­lar” side of devi­antART there is the Prints Service, a fairly pro­fes­sional and highly regarded ser­vice that allows mem­bers to sub­mit high-resolution cop­ies of their art­work and have the whole print­ing pro­cess handled for them. For this dA takes a cut of the face price of a print, but it’s a reas­on­able deal and mem­bers can set their own prices. The styl­ing of each member’s “Store” was dif­fer­ent to that of their main dA page, offer­ing a far more pro­fes­sional appear­ance to poten­tial clients.

Until a few days ago. Now, it seems, the Store pages have been tarred with the same shitty brush as the rest of the site, remov­ing the last vestiges of pro­fes­sion­al­ism from the oper­a­tion. There used to be a simple “Store” link from each member’s page to his or her Prints Store area, this is now gone. Instead a “Prints” link takes its place, which takes the user not to the store­front, but to a page list­ing the member’s prints without any other inform­a­tion at all. Nothing. Fuck-all. To get to the artist inform­a­tion that used to be present, the user must click a print, then click the artist’s name at the top of the dis­play, beside the title. This then shows the “redesigned” store­front. Are most users likely to do this? Fuck they are. And even when the artist inform­a­tion is dis­played, dA have deigned to show only the “bio­graphy” sec­tion entered by the user, not their edu­ca­tion inform­a­tion, nor their awards inform­a­tion — even the “email the artist” link has been removed com­pletely, leav­ing no way for cli­ents to get in con­tact. So full marks to dA for help­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion between artist and poten­tial client.

It used to be that the Store car­ried a more refined, business-centric atti­tude and style than the rest of the site, and this is now gone. For myself and other artists who relied on devi­antART as a chan­nel through which to sell art, the rami­fic­a­tions are not good. I have been con­struct­ing another web­site in which to show­case my pho­to­graphy, as I thought that the “gal­lery” side of dA wasn’t pro­fes­sional enough — but I was hop­ing to link inter­ested cli­ents to my dA Store to com­plete any sales. I am now very reluct­ant to do this. It’s great to see that sites like dA have the interests of their users at heart as they pub­lish unfin­ished site builds that com­pletely tear up the struc­ture and ideas that the pre­vi­ous site used to represent.