Friday Favorites are my weekly wrap-up of the cool happenings going on around Imagekind over the past week. This week saw some very exciting things including new top navigation and a kickin’ promo for free shipping. We’d love to hear what you think about the updates!

New Top Nav Header

We’ve made some significant updates in our top navigation (the Buy, Sell, Create and Community tabs). It’s pretty clear to see the changes and all the great benefits. We are sure this will help with overall navigation, making browsing of the site much more efficient.

Now you can easily see all the different options for buying, selling, and creating art right from the navigation bar. I think it’s pretty cool. What about you?

Get Free Shipping at Imagekind!

Check it out! Now through August 31st, 2009 you can get free shipping at Imagekind! Simply enter promo code BACKTOSCHOOL09 at checkout.

For full details, see the newsletter announcement here.

Friday Favorites are my weekly wrap-up of the cool happenings going on around Imagekind over the past week. This week saw some very exciting things including the addition of one of the most prolific American turn-of-the-century cartoonists, Zim Zimmerman. Also, one of our member artists posted a great review about Imagekind on our blog that I have to share! Lastly, make sure to check out the latest updates to Imagekind.

Zim Zimmerman Cartoons on Imagekind

Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman was one of the most prolific turn-of-the-century American cartoonists. Who has, however, been since largely forgotten. Founder of what is known as the “grotesque” style of caricature for his use of overly exaggerated facial and bodily characteristics in his subjects.

A Truce, or How Two Wrongs Made A Right by ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

With over 40,000 illustrations published in his lifetime, Zim’s body of work were often political in nature, highlighting the “melting pot” of American culture and ethnic minorities in the early part of the century. Though many might appear as politically incorrect in our time, the cartoons provide a historical look and critique of American culture during his. Immigrating to the US from Switzerland in 1869 at the age of seven, you can imagine Zim was all too familiar with the struggles immigrants and minorities often faced at the turn of the century.

Good Poker Hands, or Fooling the Talent by ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

Most prints were originally featured in the two top humor magazines of their day: Puck and Judge magazines. Now, in conjunction with Imagekind, ASIF-Hollywood Animation Archive has provided a collection of Zim’s cartoons for sale as high-quality framed art prints.

Presence of Mind by ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

Imagekind Review

After ordering one of his prints one of our member artists, Rubens LP, provided a fantastic review of Imagekind on his blog. He even includes pictures! You can see the full review on his blog here. Rubens LP’s conclusion? “WOW!!! Nice surprise… Very impressive.”

Thanks Rubens! I am a total fan of his work so it was especially great to hear he is a fan of Imagekind!

Imagekind Review Print: Smoke by Rubens LP

We love hearing reviews about Imagekind. If you have one yourself on your own blog, send it along! It’s like my birthday when I hear how excited people are to receive their artwork.

More Updates

We’re always updating. This week brings two! First, we released an oft-requested feature: the ability to add images in forum posts. Second, we’ve included the “AddThis” button in Imagekind Storefronts to easily share images found in an artists Storefront with your community around the web. This way, visitors can share artwork for sale on Imagekind to sites like DIGG, Facebook, Twitter and more.  It’s an opt-in feature so you can control if you want your images shared or not.

You can read all the details on the updates in the forum, here.

Friday is here again! And on Fridays, I share some of my Friday Favorites. There have been some great things happening around the site including some very useful updates and a special Summer Sale! Also, several of our members’ artwork was featured in one of the leading photography blogs! Check out all the sweet happenings below!

Forum Improvements

Yesterday, we rolled out some improvements to the forums which now allow you to keep up with your watched and group discussions much easier. We’ve added two new tabs to make it easier for you to stay up to date with the conversations in the Community that matter to you most. Check out the forum, to see the new tabs in action!

More Updates to Storefronts

At the beginning of the week we released some more updates to the Imagekind Storefronts that make it even easier to customize. With the new updates, you don’t need to know any CSS to change the colors of your Storefront, simply select the color of your choice from the color options. There are tons of options available, so you can really make your Imagekind Storefront truly customized.

We’ve also made it easier for shoppers to find your Storefront through the drop down menu listed next to your screen name. You can read about these and other updates in the announcement post.

Imagekind Summer Sale!

Love the sun? Celebrate summer with 20% off custom framing at Imagekind! Simply use promo code IKSummer09 at checkout to automatically take 20% off the frame when you choose to custom frame it. But hurry, because the promotion expires Monday, July 20 at Midnight PST. You can find all the details about this promotion here.

If you’re an artist on Imagekind, be sure to pass the promotion along to your shoppers! You can easily copy and paste the image URL to your website, blog, or (better yet!) your Storefront! That way, your shoppers can take advantage of this special summer sale too. Also, don’t forget to share it with your followers on Twitter and Facebook!

Featured on DPS

Desperation by Josh Sommers

Like a braggart parent, I am always looking for ways to show of our amazing member artists around the web. This week Darren over at Digital Photography School, was cool enough to let me show off some of our incredible Photo Manipulation Artists. If you’ve never heard of the Digital Photography School, you definitely need to check it out. There are all kinds of tips and resources shared to help improve your digital photography techniques. Stay tuned though, as you might see more incredible Imagekind artists showing up there in the coming months!

Have you seen the new artwork page on Imagekind?

We’ve just released a newly updated version of the main artwork page that’s sure to make quite an impact on the overall Imagekind experience. Now it is easier, more intuitive and all around quicker to shop for the framed artwork you love!

Just some of the amazing features:

Single click shopping with shorter purchasing path for those who don’t need all the options!
Better product displays that show frame details right on the page!
Browse links to easily see the previous and next artwork in an artist’s gallery!
Choose your product (print, canvas or greeting card) on the same page!
Quicker load time to improve the overall page performance!
Shop similar art by color, genre, tags and more!

Additionally, we have also made changes to include both our satisfaction guarantee as well as easily displaying the savings you’ll receive when shopping at Imagekind.

We are all excited about these recent updates and think the new artwork page shows off Imagekind’s unique offering; being both an active and thriving artist community site, as well as a high end framed art retailer. We’ve essentially split the page down the middle to successfully incorporate both aspects.

We have several more plans for future improvements and features. Imagekind is dedicated to continue innovating the way you shop, sell and create art. You can stay updated on all of Imagekind’s future improvements by subscribing to our RSS feed, and joining the Imagekind newsletter.

Find all of the improvements in our official announcement to our community.

Now, stop reading and go check out the new page and shop for framed art!

With over 50,000 member artists and over 1 million art prints for sale on Imagekind, the choices can be enormous when trying to find just the right high end framed art print you are looking for.

Maybe it’s a painting, of a dog. And you want that dog painting to be in a large size. Enter:

Search Filtering

Now it’s easier than ever to find exactly the art print you want! With Imagekind Search Filtering you can narrow your search by medium, size, subject, genre, and more; even orientation!

Start searching to shop for art.

Search Filtering relies on artists’ categorization of their artwork on Imagekind. Based on the account type, artists can classify their artwork through a series of options; including tags and taxonomy.

So, if you’re an artist selling your artwork on Imagekind, make sure you have the correct taxonomy set for each image. You can find the categorization options in your admin under every image. To learn more about how to set your tags and taxonomy, visit the Imagekind Member Forums.

This is just the first of several improvements we hope to be making to the search feature in the coming months. Check back often and stay tuned as we continue to refine how you shop for art.

Search Filtering is one more way we continue to make Imagekind the best community for buying, selling and creating art.

Happy Searching!

Some of you may have received an email recently informing you about membership renewals. Now it’s simple to renew your membership right from your admin.

We’ve just added a new section in every members’ admin area where you can easily view your current membership level; manually change your account type; and your preferred renewal payment method.

Now it’s easier than ever to change or upgrade your Imagekind membership level!

To view your current account type, and make changes to your preferred payment method, follow these simply steps:

1. Login to your Imagekind account
2. Click the “My Account” link at the top of the page
3. Click the “Membership Level” option in the blue header

Scroll down and you can see what your current membership level is, when your membership renews, and the option to change your preferred renewal payment method.

Using PayPal?

If you are currently setup to renew via PayPal, please be aware that there is no automatic option when using your PayPal account. Therefore, you will need to either provide a valid credit card number, or renew with PayPal manually every time your membership level expires; monthly or yearly, depending on your Imagekind account type.

We have some fantastic news for all of our artists and shoppers. At Imagekind, we strive to provide the best shopping experience by offering the best quality products at reasonable prices. In our effort to remain the number one community to buy, sell and create art, we constantly seek to improve our products and services to ensure we remain the recognized leader in high end framed art prints.

With that, we are pleased to announce archival backing is now the standard default option on all custom framed prints. This new offering ensures that the framed prints you purchase will look amazing the day they print, and for years to come.

Nate