26 Jun 2017
As it is traditional in Drawfolio during the summer months, we will try to fight the heat wave with the only thing we can do: discounts!
From this day to next September, you can have a 30% discount on your first year of PRO Plan, to make it more easy for you to have a great portfolio website that will get you opportunities and new customers.
You don't need to do anything special: the first year of all PRO plans will just cost 51,10$ instead of 73$.
12 Jun 2017
They always say Devil is in the details: the small things are the ones who make easy your day-to-day, but they can also be what makes that day extremely frustrating. That's why we keep improving Drawfolio: we want our small details to make your life easier, not the other way around.
For example: until now, you could choose the order of the galleries list in your website's home. But they were always all the public parent galleries, and you could not do much else to customize that. That's why you can now include or remove any public gallery (parent or child) on the galleries index at your site's home: just go to "Galleries" -> "Setup galleries index".
Also, some of our users were asking us to let them op-out from showing all the children galleries in the menu navigation, so you can now disable that in "Main menu and navigation" -> "Other menu options."
For any doubt, question, suggestion or problem, please contact us at uservoice or write us at [email protected].
18 May 2017
In addition to having an awesome portfolio website that helps you to build a personal brand, having information on what content is working better towards your audience is key.
Thats way, since the very beginning of Drawfolio, we set up an analytics dashboard for our PRO users with information about the traffic their websites is getting. But, honestly, there was room for improvement, and information was not visual and easily understandable enough.
That's why we worked to improve the analytics dashboard, and now we show a much more visual ranking on what pictures and galleries are having more audience in your site. We hope you find it useful!
For any doubt, question, suggestion or problem, please contact us at uservoice or write us at [email protected].
25 Apr 2017
On the last interview we made on this blog, we talked with the founders of Principia Magazine, so we really wanted our next interview to be with the team behind our favourite art & illustration independent magazine: Minchō Magazine.
We are lucky to know the founders of Minchō from its early stages (we actually were advertisers on the firt issue), so it was about to made them a proper interview. We hope you enjoy it!
Tell us a bit about Minchō: How were the project and magazine born?
Minchō was born from a previous editorial project, Linea Curve magazine. After the sudden closing of this publication on 2013, we started another one with the same goals: to give more visibility to the great artists behind cartoons, newspaper comics, publicity, music album covers, children books, and some contemporary icons unkown to most people.
And we did this with a new attitude, a new team, more focus on design, and riskier contents. All to make Minchō become the proof that second parts can be awesome.
Who's behind Minchō? Tell us about the founding team and collaborators.
The founding team of Minchō are Francisco Carrasco, who graduated in Fine Arts in AKI ArtEZ (Enschede, Holland), and was editor at the illustration Magazine Linea Curve, and Natalia Giménez, Art Historian specialized in contemporary art with a wide experience in teaching and cultural management. But when we talk about team, we must talk about our wide network of collaborators. Minchō is a reality because technology enabled us to connect with great professionals from all over the globe, and because of their personal bet and effort, and also our romanticism (and sometimes lack of pragmatism) that keeps us learning and growing strong.
What is your production process? How is each issue of Minchō cooked and built?
Despite what it may seem after seeing the careful design, bilingual edition, and international distribution, everything except printing and sewing is done at home! So we could say the "cooking" of each issue is almost a literal thing, as each issue is created both in the office and while we are cooking spaghetti on our home's kitchen.
Aside of working together, we are a couple, so we live in a non-stop brainstorming. Each issue is impatiently created from a continous questioning and our need to share our views on illustration and graphic design. On this personal "vomit" that we call Minchō, you will find a lot of our passions, mainly about contemporary art and independent publishing.
We have also been organizing the stuff we want to show, making each issue thematic, and linking the different sections of Minchō (illustration, animation, comic, design, or children albums) to the cultural present with humor, psychedelia or forklore representation as the conducting thread.
One of the things that we think make Minchō unique is that Illustration, Animation, and Comic are dealt as what they really are: Art. Why this disciplines are often though as "minor"? How can we end with this stereotypes? What do you look for on the artists your feature on the magazine?
This is because traditional art theory, where fine arts are distinguished from the applied arts, or "minor arts". There is still a long road to walk in order to undo this, withs efforts going back as early as the Arts & Crafts movement, from a century and a half ago. Even in the 60s, the Pop artists introduced advertising design or comic books in their work, with a lot of controversy from some part of the art critique. That's why we devoted our section "The New Contemporary" to show up this intersections between art and illustration/comic/animation to help end the cultural hierarchies.
About dealing with illustration as art, we do it because it deserves to have its own theorical framework, which is usually linked to art history (drawing is the common ground of all visual arts). But we have to bear in mind illustration is a discipline tightly coupled to design and market, though. Illustration must build its own space, as graphic design did in the 80s, and Minchō is born to help to this process of analyzing illustration from a solid critic framework.
Minchō is spreading internationally, not only on selling points, but also on collaborators. How did you manage to reach so many people abroad?
The good thing about a small, independent project, is that it can be more versatile and has more room to adapt or being creative. From the very first moment we knew the magazine had to be global project, as very few publications like this exist internationally. We were conscious that thanks to the online media (and Drawfolio knows also a bit of this), old frontiers of mainstream are falling down, art ideas travel faster, niches spread, and quality prevails.
There is a lot of management work behind this, though. International distribution is not an easy road to go down, and being on fairs and events is key to get yourself known.
And last but not least: What is being cooked right now at Minchō? What new stuff can we expect?
The activity of Minchō Press goes round the magazine, which is itself a mutant project that re-invents itself each two years with a new editorial design. But we are also open to collaborations that can boost the project, so you will also find us on contemporary art fairs or as teachers on illustration courses.
We are a bit unmpredictible, so if we dared to publish the latest from Yuichi Yokoyama, who knows what can be next! We've got plenty of ingredients on the fridge and the stoves are on.
Thank you a lot, Natalia and Francisco!
15 Feb 2017
As you know if you upgraded your account to PRO plan, one the available features is having your own contact form in your portfolio website. This makes things really easy for people to contact you, but it also has some risks: it makes possible for spammers to send you undesired messages, too.
We are always working on the technical side to make things hard for spammers, and today we are integrating Drawfolio with Akismet, one of the best spam detection platforms, which is widely used on the Internet, specially on sites using the Wordpress platform.
You also have a "Spam" folder on "Messages", where you can see the messages Akismet did automatically classify as Spam, and mark other spam messages you could have on your Inbox (or do the other way around, in case of false positives).
For any doubt, question, suggestion or problem, please contact us at uservoice or write us at [email protected].
