It’s Friday! And with Friday comes Friday Favorites. This week we want to make a shout out to Drawing Day 2009, which is tomorrow June 6th, and the celebration of the fabulous weather we have been having here in Seattle!

Drawing Day 2009

Illustrators of the world unite! Tomorrow is Drawing day 2009 so get out your pens and papers (or whatever your preferred medium is) and start drawing. The goal of Drawing Day is to have over one million people upload images that they create on June 6th. At Imagekind we have created a group just for this purpose. Art can be uploaded at any point over the weekend but should be created on June 6th, 2009. To find out more about Drawing Day click here.

Join the Drawing Day 2009 Group Now!

Bring in the Sunshine

Seattle is known as a cold and wet destination, but the last few weeks have been absolutely glorious. We even had a hot weather alert go out this week due to the irregularly hot temperatures. Schools are taking this in stride and there seems to be an abundance of school field trips to anywhere that involves the great outdoors. The office, on the other hand, has been a slightly different story – it is hot and sticky. To help refresh us a bit, I have chosen some great images from Imagekind member artists that celebrate the sunshine and the pleasures of these hot long days.

Have a great weekend!

Eileen

Sharing your favorite art has now become easy. With just a click of the mouse you can send any Imagekind image to your friends and family. Located on the image detail page (or as we call it the “showartwork page“), there is now a new button that allows you to spread your beloved art far and wide.

A drop down menu will display:

Now you are ready to send the art to the world. You can post to del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, or Reddit, or you can send it in a fully html formatted email to all your friends.

This is one of the cool new additions that we rolled out yesterday and we’re sure it will make a splash.

Ready, Set, Share.

- Imagekind

We are thrilled to announce a big day in the history of Imagekind. We have just launched a significant overhaul to the look and feel of the site. As some of you may have noticed we have been slowly rolling out landing pages with the new design over the last few weeks. Now, it’s time for our Homepage to shine.

The new look adds a greater level of sophistication and polish to our website and offers a much more immediate understanding of who we are and what we offer. As we continue to straddle web 2.0 and the retail space, we wanted our look to better reflect who we are as a brand, while offering our member artists greater exposure.

Our new homepage is much more visitor friendly:

• Clear large images change daily and make it easy for visitors to get a quick view of what our member artists have to offer
• Product section allows for an easy understanding of our assortment of product offerings
• Two different Member Artists are featured daily to allow greater exposure to our community

Along with the new look comes an easier navigation. Improvements include:

• A persistent left navigation (or A-column) allows customers and artists to better find their way around
• A new set of steps will help guide customers through the product selection and checkout path
• Product pages make it easier for visitors to get a good sense of all that Imagekind has to offer through better product merchandising

More changes will be happening over the next few weeks. We are thrilled about our new look and have incorporated many of the comments that we have heard from our community. We hope you like it too!

- Imagekind

We are making some changes to the site shortly. Please, hang with us if we have any transitioning pains.

- Imagekind

Congratulations to Arup Halder, who won 1^st place in the photo contest over at A Singular Creation.

The category was “Architecture of the World”. Here is Arup’s winning photograph:

‘Pattern’ by Arup Halder

Arup won a one year platinum membership to Imagekind ($95 value) plus $50 cash from the A Singular Creation folks.

Back in April, we introduced one of our friends in online art, the A Singular Creation Art Community.

Since then, Joe Barrouk from A Singular Creation has gotten an art contest running that seems pretty cool. Each month, he picks a different theme and lets the artists rip. So far, some of the topics have been “Faces and Emotions”, “World of Nature”, and “Nude”.

Take a look at the past winners or register free .  

If you end up joining the contest and winning, Joe has some cool prizes he’s giving away, including a 1-year platinum subscription at the best darn site for selling art online ever, Imagekind.

As technology becomes more and more available, the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. At Imagekind, we’re particularly grateful for this phenomenon as we get to enjoy different styles of art from lots of different countries around the globe, that otherwise might never be seen.

Juliana Maz, Bogota, Columbia
http://julianamaz.imagekind.com

Dion van Huyssteen, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa
http://digitumdei.imagekind.com

Ibrahim Lujaz, Maldive Islands
http://notsogoodphotography.imagekind.com

For a person interested in economics, there is another very intriguing thing going on here. Out of curiosity, we looked into the Per Capita GDPs of several of the countries that some of our foreign artists are selling from.

Colombia – $8,600 annually
(2006 CIA estimate)
Maldives- $8,249 annually
(2004 IMF estimate)
South Africa – $13,300 annually
(2006 CIA estimate)
USA – $44,000 annually
(2006 CIA estimate)

Let’s say that an Internet consumer strolls along looking to decorate their new apartment. They buy a few pieces of framed art from Imagekind, delivering, let’s say $150 to the artist. To someone in the United States, that’s a couple nice nights on the town. To an artist living in Bogota, that same $150 is a month’s rent on their apartment or art studio. Now, that’s pretty neat.

This post is not exactly related to art and photography but it does pertain to how we built Imagekind.  For whatever reason, I get a lot of emails from start-up entreprenuers each week asking for tips as to how Imagekind was able to raise VC money with relative ease. These are only my thoughts in no particular order based on my own opinions. I hope some of this is helpful for you if you’re looking to get your own company funded [Click for rest of post on Curious Office]