February 11, 2008
Derek Powazek Launches Pixish
Derek Powazek has launched Pixish, a new site for bringing together artists and people or businesses who need art. The setup is apparently this: Publishers or businesses create a project for which they need art, and set a deadline and offer a prize or payment. The community votes on which is the best piece, similar to how Threadless works, and the publisher/client chooses one and awards the prize to the winner.
It's a great looking site, and Mr. Powazek has built several successful online creative communities in the past (you might say he wrote the book on the subject). I'm not sure about this one. Not being an art-creating person myself, I can't speak to this personally, but I don't know if I'd like the idea if I were. A cardinal rule as a designer is don't do spec work, don't give away free creative, and it seems to me that's what this encourages. Publishers get to see a lot of free work, and artists hope their piece can stand out among the dozens or hundreds of entries for the same project. I'll be curious to see how the site works in practice, but if I were an artist, I think I'd want a community that set the scales to benefit me as much as the clients.
That said, I know Mr. Powazek's heart is in the right place, and it's a great looking site. It's clear and friendly--I've already expended many more words in describing it than they themselves needed. Check out Derek's post about how Pixish happened and then go and get yourself a Pixish account and try it out.
Love the name BTW.
Posted by dham at February 11, 2008 11:12 AM | TrackBack