CallForCreativity is a new website where artists can “promote their work, communicate, and collaborate with other creative people.” You cannot sell your art directly on this site, but you can make connections with artists and art buyers and point people in the direction of where they can buy your work.
Call for Creativity pricing and features
Let me start by saying that this site is completely free. They don’t charge anything to sign up and there is no commission fee because you cannot sell your art on the site.
So what do you get? Well, one of Call for Creativity’s best features is the actual artist’s gallery. Each gallery is a flash gallery that is clean, modern, and very professional.
However, flash galleries ARE a double-edged blade. One problem I have with them is that they sometimes deter a specific subset of clients who have slow internet connections. (Flash galleries take longer to load.)
In addition, your flash gallery on Call for Creativity will be mostly invisible to any sort of search engine web crawler. This means that your information won’t be archived by Google, Yahoo, etc, which may cut down on the number of visitors you’ll receive.
Design and layout
The design and layout of CallForCreativity.com is nothing to write home about—they’re using a standard top banner and two-column layout. Also, those two columns are pretty long, so even though I was viewing the website on a monitor set at 1920×1200, I had to scroll down quite a ways just to get to the bottom.
I can’t help but think that if their content were broken into three columns instead of two, it would improve their layout immensely. By the time I got halfway down the page, I had lost interest, and that’s unfortunate because the bottom of the page is where they decided to place all of their artwork categories.
The color scheme reminded me a little bit of a corporate website (with its contrasting blue and orange palette) rather than an art site, but then again, it did project a nice air of whimsy through the rounded letters of the logo. It’s also much more polished-looking than some of the other options available for artists.
The worst part of the layout is the information that they’ve decided to include in their right-hand column. On every single page of the site (with the exception of the flash artist galleries) they’ve stuck an artist of the week image, followed by a “history of creatives” feature, and then the full text of the latest post from their blog.
That’s right, they’ve put an incredibly long string of text with no paragraph breaks and very little spacing between each line on the right side of EVERY page. If there’s one thing that needs to be changed with their design, it’s that.
Browsing and finding art
There are three main navigational links located at the top of the homepage: one leads to the artists section, the second takes you to organizations that are using the site, and the last is for individual artwork.
The link to the artists section is entitled “Creative Individuals.” When you click on an artist’s page, you’ll find that the actual meat of each artist’s page, the gallery, is hidden below the fold. This isn’t too bad, but it is a little annoying. It makes it hard to find art if you are just browsing through the user pages.
The second link, “Creative Organizations,” is where you’ll find the businesses that are members on the site. This is useful if you want to find services for artists, although you can easily find more options on Google.
The last, and most important link, is entitled “Creative Listings.” This is where you can search through the newest art on the site, or narrow down your search in other ways. CallForCreativity also offers a wide variety of art to browse, from graphic design to leatherwork, every kind of art is there.
Is it worth joining?
Well, it is free publicity for your work, which is always a good thing.
I can’t imagine you’ll get a whole lot of business from this site unless you really worked hard to get your name out there, but then again, that’s what you need to do no matter what sites you decide to join.
To learn more, and to see everything for yourself, please visit CallForCreativity.com.