Dombrovskis was a Tasmanian wilderness photographer,
Piccaso was a cubist painter,
Tim Winton writes about place and community,
Le Corbusier was one of the 1st the architects to use concrete,
Azimov was a Sci-fi writter….

Now think about these names: Myers, Billabong, nike, McDonalds, Teva, Coles, Mountain Design, …. etc
Each of these also brought to mind an image did it not? one that included the logo and the style and the contents of their stores….

It’s got to do with the whole BRANDING thing. we love brands and logos and symbols…. an artist or creator who wants to be successful (as in well known) needs a brand – a way of doing things that fits within a recognisable template. So you have to have a recognisable style. one that is reasonably consistent. … Because people like to know what to expect.
People like to put other people in boxes – it feels safer that way! If you keep breaking out of the box they want to put you in, they don’t know what to do with you or how to relate to you and so you will be avoided.

Think of it another way: Homo sapients are a very social species who are also a little contradictory…
In general, we like to think of ourselves as individuals, but we also like to fit in to a social crowd. So unique artwork gets a higher price tag than mass produced stuff because it is unique, but people are more likely to buy unique one off / limited edition art or have their house designed or read a book if there is other things out there that are similar – that shair a brand-like identity.

So, a creative person who is just starting out and who wants to be ’successful’ needs to find a style, a brand and stick to it – at least until they get a ‘name’, then they can experiment if they want to, but only if the experimentation is extensive. By that I mean a series, a set, a whole exhibitions worth. … or several.

It also means that if an artist has a particularly ‘new’ and different style, it is going to be a very slow start while they wait for the brand to become known – while they wait for a few brave individuals start a trend and risk being different by buying weird stuff. After a while , when some point of critical mass is reached, the artists work will stop being weird, will become safe/different and maybe even popular. it is a funny old journey, to be sure!

I read somewhere that many of the ‘great’ creators (Picasso for example) were not going solo in a new style, but were part of a group of creators who were all exploring a similar style at the same time…. and the great ones were not necessarily the 1st, just the ones that became more popular. Maybe they outputted more work and so reached the critical mass point a little sooner, maybe their style was more constant, maybe they had better marketing skills….who knows?… (Someone must, I just haven’t found their report yet!)

Graphic Designers on the other hand….

From looking around the web, it seems that graphic designers and illustrators break this mold all the time. It seems that you need to be more versatile? Or is it only the people just starting out that are more versatile…  while the more experianced ones with a srtong client base or who are in demand have developed a style that works for them?

Perhaps that is how it works for all artists, designers & creators?

What are your opinions & ideas on this?

Which got me thinking …. …. ….  Just what is an online folio anyway?

When she mentioned that it should be a folio site… well my head just decided that was way too formal. because, well, what is the 1st thing that comes to mind when you think of a folio?

For me it it a large black leather album with photos and other work carefully laid out on the – usually also black – pages and all of it neatly labeled. Then, on the other hand an image comes to mind from a fictional book somewhere of an Edwardian Lady with her folio of paintings all neatly held on rack on a wheeled trolley.

In transferring that concept to modern media, we get the idea that a folio is a carefully laid out web page of images, using sub pages as needed and ‘galleries’ for each topic. Alternatively it could be something very similar, but burnt to DVD instead. It might include still images, as well as moving images and even music.

This is the most popular folio layout style on the web – eg, personal galleries, flickr, stock agencies, ‘light boxes’, flash slide shows, etc. However, many of these are also dynamic folios, in that they are searchable through the tag system, effectively letting the user create their own ‘folio’ out of the artist’s work to look through. So, in a way, folios are becoming much less artist driven: in that the artist no longer decides exactly what the viewer sees, or in what order they see it, or even what combination of images are viewed together.

That put my head in a spin and I realized that I could just incorporate the ‘traditional’ type folio idea right into the blog – instead of having it on a separate set of pages. I have seen a couple of other design/art blogs doing that same thing, but had dismissed the idea as impractical. But perhaps it is not, perhaps it is actually much more sensible!

After all, Wordpress uses a nice set of categories and tags for posts which readers can use to find the type of content/images they are interested in viewing, but at the same time, if I want to control which images are seen together, I can just put them together in one post.

So, getting back to the ‘What is an Online Folio?’ question …. It seems to me, that an online folio is, at it’s most basic, a collection of stuff that you present to the world in order to show what you can do, what your style is, who you are and what you are like. If a blog is part of your folio site, then your folio is not just your images/work, it is what you say about them too, and how you interact with the world, it is anything you say in that blog. Where the traditional folio of images was usually presented in person, an online folio is presented remotely. … So, in effect, the rest of the blog is like an interview, helping potential clients get to know you as a person rather than as a collection of works.

….

I would love to know your thoughts on this …. and what solutions you have come up with. After all, we are the ones that set the trend for the future.

Thinking of the future, just a another random thoght … What are online folios and blogs going to look like in the future when screens are 3D? How will 2D data be presented? not to mention navigation – 3D mice? Or just reach in and touch the links? the mind boggles!