Gfxartist

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GFXartist is an online artistic community where digital artists can profile themselves and get in touch with peers and enthusiasts through their work. It was first launched in January, 2000 and revised at several occasions. The last revision took place in early 2002 and resulted in the relaunch of GFXartist in the shape is it in today on March 3rd, 2002. GFXartist is the creation of Arno Drost, Martin Kool and Martijn van Zal. Joined in 2003 by Marvin Ronk, all four are also partners in the new media firm Brothers in art.

GFXartist houses a large, but intimate community comprised mostly of artists practicing (digital) painting, illustration, photography and photo manipulation. As of June 2006, GFXartist has about 44,000 registered accounts and 41,000 gallery entries. About 1/4 of the members are female, 3/4 are male. The average age of members is 25 years.

GFXartist has submission guidelines, rejecting certain types of work. In the past work was sporadically screened after submitting. Since November 2005, Community moderators have been appointed. These moderators are regular, core members willing to enforce the submission guidelines and in general keep the peace using their extended privileges.

To protect young viewers from explicit material GFXartist has an explicit content filter. By default, it displays a message to people who want to view the work. Registered members can later change their personal settings to always bypass the warning or to never show explicit work.

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[edit] GFXartist History

The site was first launched in January, 2000 in the form of a portal offering news, resources, tutorials and later a forum. Artists who joined GFXartist received their own web space at GFXartist and simple tools to draw attention to their space from the front page of the site. Mid 2000, Martijn van Zal joined Arno Drost and Martin Kool. Martijn brought in programming knowledge that resulted in an art gallery where the GFXartist members could display there work collectively. This extra feature was not an integral part of the website at first, existing at a separate domain. The gallery however quickly gained popularity and moved the three founders to rethink the GFXartist concept.

In February 2001 a new version of GFXartist launched. The artwork and galleries were now an integral part of the site and members had a real presence through their discussions and comments. Even though this first revision was bug-ridden and unstable, it did form the basis of what GFXartist is today. Unfortunately resources did not keep up with GFXartist's growth. In the upcoming period several hosts would save and then tragically dump GFXartist, up until late April 2001. Despite best efforts, the founders were unable to keep GFXartist online. The site was not commercially exploited, but did require costly resources. GFXartist wouldn't be more than a splash page for nearly a year.

Despite the setback, the spirit remained intact. As Brothers in art grew as a company, more resources became available and in early 2002 the team started again, crafting a more solid website. On March 3rd, 2002 the GFXartist that exists today launched.

[edit] Elite Members

At the end of every month, GFXartist lines up members who have submitted the most popular works during that month. A maximum of 5 members are nominated in the categories: 3D Modelling, Drawing, Painting, Photo Manipulation, Photography and Design. The nomination starts at the first of the next month and members get 7 days to vote for one member per category who they feel excel in skill and creativity. The member from each category with the most votes is given the 'elite' status. They are marked with a golden member icon and their work is moved to the elite galleries. The system makes high quality works easily accessible, and creates space for new talent in the regular galleries.

Among GFXartist's elite members are Linda Bergkvist, Christophe Vacher and Anry Nemo.

The elite member status is a controversial one. The title suggests artistic merit, skill and creative talent. However, the data used to select the elite member nominees is more likely to produce popular, socially skilled members, rather than creators of highly valued work. Discussions regarding the value and the validity of the elite system often surface when the elite status is won by an 'average skilled' member.

[edit] Submission Guidelines and Community Moderators

GFXartist has always had submission guidelines in place that prevented material to be submitted that either violated copyright or contained pornographic scenes. Later these guidelines were expanded to convince members not to submit work such as quick sketches, snapshots, tutorial recreations and works relying mostly on filters/effects. These guidelines were however not consistently enforced.

In November 2005, Martin (founder and community manager) put together a team of community moderators. Members from the community, willing to moderate submissions and help settle arguments and other social issues online communities produce. As GFXartist as a site is almost completely shaped by its members, granting several of these members the privileges to stop deviant behaviour is a logical step.

The combined effort of the community moderators resulted in a new set of guidelines, shaped to be enforced. These guidelines went in effect early May 2006. While still largely the same as the previous guidelines, the new guidelines rejected recreations of other works, even when done in another medium.

As these new guidelines have, as of yet, not been applied to previously submitted works they tend to cause some controversy. Especially artists who trace photo material in another medium (pencil or digital) often find their works rejected, while there are regular and even elite members who currently have such works up in the galleries. GFXartist moderators currently moderate works as they are submitted and evaluate each work individually, keeping in mind the skill and potential of its author.

In March 2008, a new admin only known as Wysiwyg or Brett was announced. Many welcomed this addition due to the member's past dedication as both a member and then later Moderator. After posting a long list of goals the moderator team started creating forum threads for the members to give feedback to help redefine the current set of 'category definitions' that members use to classify their art.

In May 2008 a new set of category definitions were posted to help delineate (how GFX views) the differences between Painting vs. Drawing, and Photomanipulation vs. Photoenhancement. In addition, pictorial references were added to help those unfamiliar with the Submission Guidelines.

In late May 2008, it was announced that Wysiwyg was leaving the site due to a combination of family related matters and displeasure with the founders of the site. The last 2 Community Moderators agreed to follow suit due to what they felt was a lack of support structure. Currently amongst the members there is an overall sense of abandonment of the site by it's founders, as they are currently putting their full attention to income producing projects like their company Brothers In Art. However, the community has always been the backbone of the site, and it's members continue to push for it's growth.

[edit] Quality over Quantity

The artwork submission limit, installed on May 15th 2006 once again proves that GFXartist prefers quality over quantity. The limit allows artists to submit just 6 artworks during a month. This should motivate them to submit only their finest work and leave out quick, effortless works. On top of that, the limit also prevents members from using several exploits that increase their chance of becoming an elite member. Despite this rather strict measure, it was accepted by the member base with surprisingly little resistance and appears to have the indented effects on the artworks submissions.

GFXartist's quality over quantity is also one of the reasons why this community has not grown to immense proportions (like say, DeviantArt) and has retained its intimate character. Despite its 5-7 million page views per month, GFXartist currently has about 7000 accounts that are used on a weekly basis. On average there are 60 artwork submissions per day. Several members have expressed that although they are lurking, they in fact have artwork but do not feel 'ready' to expose it to their peers at GFXartist just yet.'

[edit] Technical Specifications

The system that drives the current GFXartist was custom build and is the property of Brothers in art. It was developed with PHP and uses a MySQL database. At its present time, GFXartist runs on two physical servers. One server runs Apache to serve pages and thttpd to server images. The second server runs the database.

Initially GFXartist ran on one server, in April 2003 it moved to two servers designated Sulley and Lilo. When it became obvious that the ISP appeared to charge for internal data traffic, GFXartist moved back to one, high performance server designated Milo. In August 2004, GFXartist again required more resources and moved to two servers, this time in a private network. The two servers were designated Pain and Panic who up until today serve GFXartist to its members and visitors.

Since its launch in 2002, the system has suffered very few severe crashes. The crash in October 2002 was the most notable one, during which several hours of data were lost. Other noteworthy downtime was the result of hardware upgrades.

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