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Rules of the Road is a series of articles about how artists can use and interact with the Digital World, and how to best navigate that space. Click on a title to bring you to the full article:
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Remember when you started taking art classes? You probably came across a teacher who told you to work from the general to the specific. When you paint, you do not start with details... the same advice applies to organizing your computer for your art career. Think of your computer as an art project: organize it with general categories (folders), which will contained more and more detailed information (sub-folders: folders inside folders). In this article, I make suggestions based on how I have organized my computer, and give you advice to take full advantage of digital storage. I start with very general folders on my C drive: I have a folder labeled Art Career where everything I need as an artist is stored, and a folder labeled Website for Artists, where I have all my information to run the business. Let's look at ways you can organize your Art Career folder. Here's a list of the sub-folders I have in my Art Career folder, which you can adapt to your own needs: 1. Artist Packet folder: this is the first and most important folder you will create. In it, you will keep a current CV, a current artist statement, a current bio, and from 15 to 20 high resolution images with a work samples list. This packet of information will allow to apply to any opportunities easily, because you will have all the basic information at your fingertips that, without fail, you will need to supply for grants, residencies, and most proposals. When you keep a folder of high resolution images, you can copy them and place them in a “Call” folder (see below) where they can be re-sized according to each call's guidelines. 2. To-Do folder: here you will list opportunities that are interesting to you in their own sub-folders, which you can also label by due date, or priority. For example, if you want to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship and you know it will be due in September of 2020, make a folder called “Guggenheim Fellowship Sept2020”. Within each opportunity sub-folder, keep a text file with the guidelines and any pertinent information such as the images you will submit. Once you start your application process, keep the files you are sending in the sub-folder for that call. That way, you keep a track record of what you have sent out for each opportunity year after year: the images, letters of intent, CV, etc. 3. Marketing folder: here you can have a sub-folder for your website (with all the files that make up the site), any information you want to keep for social media such as images, and an updated email list in an excel spreadsheet. In my email list, I add a note for each person I have met, so I can remember how we are connected, or how we met. 4. Finances folder: keep an excel spreadsheet labeled with the year, where you can record income and expenses by month. This will make tax season less painful. I enter information there every month or so... mostly because I find it to be a chore to do every week! You can also keep invoices if you do commissions, and track if the invoices have been paid or not. 5. Inventory folder: if you are a gallery artist, and regularly send out your artwork to different galleries, it is a good idea to keep an excel spreadsheet labeled by year, where you can track which artwork has gone to which gallery, if the artwork has been sold, been shipped back, or is being stored at your gallery. 6. Archives folder: here you can move anything that is no longer relevant for the year. Move past budgets, calls you have applied to, past inventories, older CV and statements, etc. The archives will let you keep all the above folders with clean, and clear information. The most important thing you must remember to do is to BACK UP your digital files. If you keep your folders organized, doing a back-up will be simple and quick. My suggestion is to get an external drive, and at least on a weekly basis, back up the first five folders I advised you create: artist packet, to-do list, marketing, finances, and inventory. Every year, move older files into the Archives, and back that up too. I prefer an external drive over the cloud: my information remains private, it is free, I do not need Internet access, and I can take it with me in an emergency. That said, if you prefer using the cloud... do so. The important thing to remember is to do back ups! Your computer is your best assistant in your art career: organize it with folders that make sense to you, and will make applying to calls, filing taxes, and reaching out to patrons easy and stress-free. And by the way, you can also organize your in-box in similar ways, making folders that are pertinent to you, and moving emails that you have read in their respective folders, so your in-box stays clean.... and can even sometimes be empty! |
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Many artists have asked me recently about protecting their images from online theft. Downloading photos from websites is as easy as 1-2-3 so… what can you do to protect your work, and more importantly, should you be worried about it? 1. Why is your work online? Let’s start by examining the reasons you have put your work online in the first place. As an artist, having a website means that millions of people and potential collectors are able to see images of your work for free. A digital portfolio can reach potential galleries, collectors, art critics, curators, museums, friends and family. To ensure your site will be seen by as many people as possible, it needs to be easily accessed, should be easy to navigate, with clear images that are large enough to be seen properly on most monitors, yet not too big that they will take too long to download . Making it easy for everyone to see your work of course makes the images vulnerable to theft. What tools are available to prevent theft and are they effective? 2. Are the tools to protect images effective? There have been many attempts to prevent theft from websites, from disabling right-click to putting watermarks on images. Unfortunately, most of those have simple work-arounds that any tech-savvy thief will know:
3. Who are the thieves anyway? Let’s stop for a minute and think about the purposes of our potential thieves. Possibly the most threatening would be someone stealing images for mass printing and distribution. Imagine walking into a Bed and Bath, and seeing your paintings on shower curtains! (and there are plenty of examples of that occurrence, unfortunately). Here, your best defense is the web itself: images prepared for the web are usually not suitable for printing, because they are at a low resolution (72 dot-per-inch) and are typically fairly small. A licensing company usually has large pools of artists doing work for them, and basically do not need to steal art that will reproduce poorly on their products, and lower their quality. 4. Can nothing be done? If you are truly worried about copyright infringement,
you can register your images with the government (see the government
site at www.copyright.gov).
The standard fee is $55 (as of 2020). According to the law: Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. You only need to have the copyright registered if you wish to take legal actions against someone: Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. Beware that an actual lawsuit against anyone can be quite expensive, and you probably should be comfortable spending up to $5, 000 and risk not recovering any monies. Legal action can also create a lot of anxieties: I have had to hire a lawyer to write threatening letters to someone who had stolen digital information, and the stress was intense. In conclusion, though the risks of copyright infringement do exist, artists might not want to spend too much time worrying about their images being stolen for nefarious purposes. Most people who will download your images will do so with or without your permission, and most likely will not have any criminal intents (bloggers, galleries, friends, students). For those who do have criminal intent, bringing any legal action against them will be costly, time-consuming, and in the end, may not bring any reparations or compensations. You need to weigh the benefit of a lawsuit against the actual gain, keeping in mind the stress. and financial burden it will likely cause in your life. |
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According to a Wall Street Journal Online article:
The cadets were victims of Phishing, and West Point used the mock exercise to demonstrate its effectiveness in an effort to prevent future attacks on students. Training users in recognizing Phishing attempts is the best prevention against identity theft and fraud. Outlined below are the most common Phishing attacks, and ways to avoid falling victim to this widespread Internet deception. What is Phishing? The best way to obtain another person’s password is by asking them. Though it sounds silly and obvious, it is the most widely used method to obtain sensitive information. Phishing has become the Internet’s equivalent of asking for a password, and computer users fall victims every year to phishing scams. Phishing is defined in Wikipedia as the following: “Phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication” Phishing really means fishing for information: a bait is thrown out, and your username and password are the fish the thief is trying to catch. What does it look like? Phishing will look like a legitimate email from a legitimate company such as PayPal, your bank, or the IRS. In the message, a scare tactic might be used, such as “Your account will be terminated” but most often, the email will simply ask you to “verify” information by logging into your account. A link to log into your account will be provided in the email message. This link will go to a website that looks exactly like the legitimate site, and you probably won’t think twice about entering your username and password. Phishing can also occur while you are logged into your account. In this technique, a pop-up window or a new screen appears, claiming that you have been logged out, and asking you to log back in to continue using your account. How to avoid Phishing? 1. Don’t click that link! If you have legitimate concerns about your account, start a new browser window and type the company's website into the address bar of the browser to bypass the link provided by the email message. The IRS, PayPal or your bank will NEVER send emails with a link to your log-in account. Most websites now have what is called an SSL certificate that verifies ownership of their domain: therefore, legitimate sites will start with https, and will have a padlock icon next to their domain. This insures (as of this writing) that you are on the company's site, and not a dummy site meant to look like it. 2. Don’t log back in If you suspect Phishing activity, report the message to the company impersonated in the email. You can also submit suspected Phishing activity to PhishTank. To read more about Phishing on Wikipedia, go to: |
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This article is a check list of definition and advice on how images are seen, stored and named for a website. I start with the most basic definition (a pixel) and go through file format and naming conventions for the web. Pixels A pixel (short for picture element) is the smallest square of color on your computer monitor. Put a bunch of pixels together, and you get an image! Typically, a monitor will have something called “resolution” which defines how many pixels across can be displayed. The higher the number, the better the picture on your screen. The most common resolution as of 2020 is 1366×768 for desktop monitors, and the viewport for most smartphones will be around 412x732 (for most androids. iphones are about 414x896 - there are a lot of variations within that range). Images are often described in terms of pixels: the width and height are defined in x number of pixels across, and y number of pixels in height. Again, the higher the number, the more information will be contained in the file, and the better the picture will be. Most sites will be web responsive: meaning the images and text will resize according to the user's screen. You do need to consider the highest resolution, and post images that will look good for a large screen, and let the browser resize your images automatically for the small ones. Howver, you also need to consider Internet speed: if your images are too big, it may slow down the site, which can be problematic (and also consider the copyright/download issue mentioned in the article on digital theft). I usually have images that will be around 800 to 1000 pixels in width, which will look good on most large monitors, yet will be small enough to display relatively fast for most Internet users.. Mega pixels A mega pixel is 1 million pixels, and is often used to describe the quality of a picture taken from a digital camera. A mega pixel for a digital camera describes the size of the picture in terms of width and height. For example, a camera that takes pictures at 3.1 mega pixels means that the picture is 2048 × 1536 , which multiplies to 3.1 million. Naming conventions Most operating systems try to be as user friendly as possible. They do not want you to worry about the underbelly of the computer and how it works. Though a very nice concept in theory, it is to a certain extent a disservice to the user. Why? Because you are unlikely to know what the server where your site is going to be hosted uses as an operating system, and some have stricter rules about naming conventions than others. To be safe, I restrict myself to the alphabet and numbers. Underscores and dashes seem to be universally accepted, but I stay away from blank spaces, question marks, forward and backward slashes and their ilk. Simply put: keep your names descriptive such as blueflower.jpg and simple. Try to limit yourself to the alphabet and numbers. Everything else might be asking for trouble. File format The file format for an image basically determines how the image information is stored on a computer. The computer uses an algorithm to compress the information as much as possible without losing image quality. The most commonly used format for the web is jpg. It is currently probably the best way to store an image’s information and still maintain a decent image quality. Designers used to save their files as .gif, which basically stored all the image information with only 256 colors and still maintained a good image quality. The advantage of a .gif is that images were quite small and therefore fast to download. The .gif format was patented by a company called Unysis and users were informed that they would have to pay royalties if they wanted to have .gif images on their website. The good news is that the patent has expired, and you are free to use the .gif format. The .png format (pronounced PING) was developed as an alternative to the .gif format, but browsers display the images inconsistently, and the adoption of this format has been slow, and is not widespread..
A computer monitor uses Red Green and Blue light to display images. Print uses CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. Make sure that your images are saved in an RGB format or they will not display on most browsers. You can save an image as a CMYK jpg but it will not display on browsers. DPI DPI stands for dot per inch, and is a measure of how much information is contained in a one inch by one inch square of an image: the higher the DPI, the more information is stored, the clearer the image will be. However, it makes no difference for the monitor: a 72 DPI image will look exactly the same as a 300 DPI image. For the purposes of a website, it is better to keep images at a lower DPI because the images will be smaller and download faster without losing any perceptible quality. |
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Designing a good website seems to require an endless checklist of chores: organize and select the materials, photograph the artwork, write a bio, an artist statement and an updated resume. You need to decide how to display the materials, what color scheme will look best with your art, what fonts will compliment your work… and more! Don’t give up! I have compiled 20 important points that Artists should keep in mind when designing their website. Keep these guidelines as checkpoints during your site creation, or to check and improve an existing site. 1. Keep it simple. 2. Keep your file size low. 3. Keep your navigation simple. 4. Have your own domain name. 5. No "under construction" page. 6. Prominent contact info. 7. Label all artwork. 8. Include a brief Art statement and resume. 9. Keep your text simple. 10. Avoid underlined text. 11. Keep your color scheme subdued. 12. Avoid background image. 13. Avoid background music. 14. No cutesy mouse animation. 15. Don’t disable back button. 16. Refrain from using frames and flash. 17. Make sure your site is compatible in all browsers.
You now also need to make sure that your site will display properly on all screen sizes: from the smallest phone to the largest screen size on desktop, and even TV. Check your site on several devices to make sure it resizes correctly across all devices. 18. Check that all your links work. 19. Open all external links in new window. 20. Keep an honest relation with your gallery.
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Notes from the DAC Workshop: Survivor, an artist's opportunity workshop |
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I attended the Survivor workshop (May 30-June 1 2008) offered through the Dumbo Arts Center. Below are my notes and brief summaries of what was discussed. Even though the article was written over 10 years ago, the advice for artists is still current, in my opinion.
The panel discussion started with Kanishka Raja stressing the importance of building connections within your art community and among your peers, and offering as an example his experience of going to Skowhegan and meeting fellow artists there who later recommended him to New York galleries. The moderator pointed out how competitive Skowhegan is, to which Kanishka responded: “it took me 3 times to get accepted... and rejection is awful”. I can't tell you how refreshing it was to hear established artists admitting that rejection is never easy, no matter where you are in your career. It seemed more honest than the usual advise I have gotten over the years which has basically boiled down to “Get over it!”. The artists on the panel had different ways to deal with rejection: applying to as many opportunities as possible to dilute the pain of rejections; getting angry instead of depressed and using that energy in a positive way; allowing themselves to feel bad for a day, and moving on to the next application. Rejection is an unfortunate part of an artist life, and I applaud the panel for being honest and human about the sting of having work rejected. Moving on in the discussion, the general consensus among the 3 artists is that an art career is non-linear, meaning you can have great success one year, and sell nothing the next. In order to sustain those ups and downs, artists should concentrate on making art consistently, and making art that is honest: don't try and second-guess what the market wants because chances are that the market will change its mind! Be true to yourself and your art. These artists also stressed the importance of networking: networking as creating friendship among your peers, helping your fellow artists, and creating a larger sense of an art community. So don't forget to venture out of the studio and meet other artists, and don't hesitate to help your colleagues who might one day help your career as well.
Artists should ideally have ready a basic information packet that can be used and built upon to apply to different types of opportunities: grants, gallery opportunities, residencies, etc. The packet should contain at minimum: an artist statement, a resume, a CV, and visual materials. Artist statement Resume and CV Visual materials - this information is from
2008: Here, I want to dispel an urban legend that came up during the presentation. Some folks are under the impression that jpg images will lose quality as they are opened and closed. This is simply NOT the case. You can open and close a jpg a million times, and it will appear the same way. The confusion comes from the fact that SOME image editors will re-compress the jpg file after you edit the image AND either save it or “save it as” a different filename. Additional materials General advise
Nyfa source is a searchable database of grants, opportunities and services for individual artists. Though I have found their new login protocol to be quite annoying, NYFA is not only free but it is the best and most comprehensive websites for artists. NYFA source lets you do basic searches (such as awards
based on geographical location and types of awards) to more advanced
searches such as searches by keyword, or types of discipline. NYFA
source will launch its new site at the end of June with more filters
and capabilities. I highly recommend you spend some time looking
for opportunities there.
Sarah has different opinions on the role of an art statement than Melissa Potter, which made the presentation both interesting and confusing for me! For Sarah, the main goal of an art statement is to be a point of entry leading to the work. As such, it should be direct, honest, simple and clear, and mainly be descriptive as opposed to offering a critique of the work: let the viewer interpret the work themselves, don't necessarily do that for them before they see the art. The speaker's advise was to establish a writing process similar to an art making process: generate ideas first, and let the writing flow completely uncensored, then go back and edit the statement, clarifying and organizing your ideas. Her suggestions were to keep the statement short (100 words to 300 words maximum) and to let your own voice come through. She felt there was no need to contextualize the work, but instead to aim at giving a mental picture of the work. She suggested artists read art listing blurbs in the newspaper, looking for descriptive language as opposed to critical language or opinions. Use formal art elements to describe your work (color, composition, line, form, etc..), but do not use too many elements in the description: don't give the reader too many choices. The statement needs to be a narrative that grabs the reader's attention. As such, ask friends and colleagues to read your statement and give you feedback.
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