Where have you been?

It has been a while since I have released a proper Community Development Update, and that is due to a lot of different reasons. The primary one involves lots and lots of work behind the scenes! So read on to get a heaping helping of all things DA!

deviantART…what is it and where is it going?

So, here we all are, on deviantART, submitting work, commenting, making friends, browsing art, and so on. But where are we?

Personally, I feel we are virtual pioneers at the forefront of something amazing.

I feel that we are just now starting to see what a community like this is capable of doing. A community that has grown on word of mouth in a natural organic way. With no fistfuls of money thrown at it to promote it. No fancy commercials. A community that envelops artistic styles from across the spectrum and deviants from every single inch of the planet.
A community that is without a doubt the sum of its parts. I think deviantART, this community, you...are entirely capable of becoming the most relevant artistic force in the world.

Think about. Where else or at what time has there ever been a thriving community of 4 million people and growing all gathered under such an all encompassing idea as "art". The Renaissance period? Small potatoes. Making comparisons is almost useless since nothing remotely like it has ever happened.

We are constantly watching new styles emerge, new trends, new forms of art that don't even have names yet. I'm sitting here looking at a piece of canvas with isometric pixel art printed on it. Two years ago nobody was thinking about doing that.

This is the ultimate concept of a melting pot. We have photographers being influenced by painters being influenced by vector artists being influenced by anime being influenced by fractal art being influenced by sculpture and on and on.
People are no longer looking outside of DA to see what the next thing will be, they are coming here in droves to see it in the making.
This is not idle bragging by any means.
This is fact. More and more every day deviants are getting plucked from the site to work on comic books, in the fashion industry, as professional photographers, as web designers, doing art for bands, videos, video games, gallery showings, concept art, it goes on and on and on.

I have read the comment "we're looking for people with that deviantART style to their work."
Let that one sink in for a bit. And think about in 10, 20 years when some of these new styles that are being born are fully advanced and recognized. Your name could very easily be referred to as being a pioneer of it in the early days, and for an artist that is the pinnacle of compliments.

Well, now we know we're awesome, but we gotta ask, Where is our Stuff?!?!

This past year we have talked about a lot of different things that are coming out. Like portfolio, the party system, collections, rebuilding the message center, and so on. We are working on all of them and a lot of other projects and during the process we realized that the best possible way to do it is to build them as integrated features as opposed to separate projects.
This causes some delays in when things launch, but will help insure that when they do launch, lots of them will launch all at once and they will all work smoothly right off the bat.
So just hang in there because once you see some of the things we have up our sleeves we think you will be pretty happy you waited.

Okay now we know where that stuff is, but we have some concerns about site policy

Well, glad to hear that, because so do we. Much of the current policy regarding everything from copyright to stock use to how you guys interact, for the most part the foundation is good but the particulars are sort of old and getting somewhat out of date.

When a lot of it was first written actual laws pertaining to digital art and online behaviour didn't even exist and then when they did emerge they almost instantly changed, so it has been a somewhat difficult challenge in keeping with our own site created policy and making sure they adhere to USA laws as that is where we are based out of.
But now that landscape has settled down and we have been giving some long hard looks at how we handle a lot of areas.

The ultimate goal is to rewrite our policies in a way that truly allows the utmost freedom to you, as artists, without bringing any legal issues upon us. To help this along, in June myself, $realitysquared, $damphyr, $Moonbeam13 and a few non staff people for an outside perspective, will be all meeting in person for one week to go over it all from top to bottom. And when I say one week, what this means is, the Director of Community Development, The Director of Copyright and Etiquette and his mina administrator, the Director of Artist Relations and several others will be pretty much locked in a room for 7 days solid and we won't be coming out of it till we have a brand spanking new set of policy guidelines for everybody.

Wow this all sounds great…except for one thing… what's up with the new ads?

As some of you may have noticed there are a few more ads here and there for non subscribers. We all know ads suck but unfortunately they are a necessity to help pay for more servers and just the cost of maintaining a site this big. We are consistently right up there in the top 100 most trafficked sites around and when you reach that range servers and the maintenance and power needed to run them becomes far from cheap. So rather than selling our souls to some faceless nameless corporation we put some new ads in here and there to balance out the costs.
We do keep an open line of communication open for feedback, questions and concerns about ads which you can find here in the Advertising Status Forum.
I think it is also worth mentioning that we are the only site I know of, of this size that does such a thing.

Now that the site is huuuuuuge will we be seeing bigger and better contests and events?

The answer to that is yes, yes and hell yes! We have some really interesting contest developments going on that you should stay tuned for in the coming months. We are about to jump up quite a few levels of intensity and prizes compared to what some of you may be used to. My advice, whatever your medium is, begin sharpening your skills now.

Well thanks for all the info!

You are very welcome and thank you for helping make something as unique as this site happen in the first place!