28 Oct 2019
In our previous post we told you about the first of our trips in September (which was to Marseille). This time, we are going to tell you about our big week in Colombia.
As we may have said already before, since 2018 we are associated to the University of Valencia Science Park. One of the advantages of doing so is access to programs and grants from the networks the University is member of. One of these networks is RedEmprendia, a network of universities from Spain & Latam promoting sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship.
Thanks to a program from that network (the Companies Landing), we had a small internationalization grant to make a short commercial visit to a country in Latin America. We already had some PRO users in Colombia, and the period we could do the visits did fit with Entreviñetas 2019 in Bogotá, so Colombia was a natural decision for us. We applied to the program, and thanks to University of Valencia Science Park and our host University in Colombia (University of Antioquia at Medellín), we built a 7 days mission with talks and meetings in Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá.
Our first two days in Colombia were in Cali. Our hosts there were Expin Medialab, the space of joint investigation in Science, Art, and Technology on the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente. We were one of the speakers on the Expin Medialab Workshop, the event about innovation and creative entrepreneurship that Expin organizes each year.
In our Workshop session in the morning our public were mainly multimedia engineering and graphic design students, and we talked, of course, about Drawfolio, but also gave some advice about how to starting companies on creative industries. Other speakers were Carlos Navas, founder of Doo, and Camilo Sandoval & Harrison Zapata, UX developers at OL Software.
On the afternoon, we went on with a workshop where we got more specific and showed some of the services and tools we use on a day-to-day basis on software, marketing, prototiping, or project management tasks. The next day, the team from Expin Medialab were kind enought to arrange for us a talk at the Fine Arts School of Cali, were we talked again about Drawfolio, and gave some advice about personal marketing and portfolio sites for visual artists. We were lucky enough to meet the management team of the school, too.
Our next stop was Medellin, were our program hosts (the Innovation unit of University of Antioquia) arranged a 2-day schedule of meetings for us, with artists, cultural projects, creative industries companies, innovation labs from university, or the management team of Medellín's startup incubator Parque E. We also could give a lecture to the alumni of the Culture Entrepreneurship Master Course, where we talked about Drawfolio and also about our experience building a creative and cultural industries business.
Last but not least, was Entreviñetas Market at Bogotá. Entreviñetas Market was held as a part of the "Reading under the trees" event promoted by the Council of Bogotá, and took place on Bogotá's National Park (hence, its name). Entreviñetas is a market of self-published comic books and illustration, where we had the chance to meet a lot of great artists from Colombia. The Entreviñetas team also gave us a space for a workshop about Drawfolio and Portfolio Websites.
It was quite an intense week! We still had time to do some sightseeing in Bogotá: take a walk around La Candelaria, visit the stunning Gold Museum, or go up Monserrate. The Landing program was a great opportunity for us to start up agreements in Colombia, and we couldn't have done in without the help of RedEmprendia, the University of Valencia Science Park, and all the organizations that supported us at Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá. Thanks a lot to everyone!
14 Oct 2019
As we told you in our last post, during this last September we did two international trips (to Marseille and Colombia). Today, we will tell you a bit about the first one, which we did under CHEBEC program.
Project Chebec (Hacking the Mediterranean economy through the Creative and Cultural Sector) is funded by European Union Interreg MED's fund, and supports Cultural and Creative Indutries's access to new markets while keeping their own identity, with the final aim to favor MED clusters (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, or Serbia) attractiveness for creative people.
Drawfolio has been one of the chosen projects for this program in Valencia, where EconCult (Area of Research in Economics of Culture from the Faculty of Economics of University of Valencia) is one of the partners of the european project. During this year, we have been attending a course about internationalization and european funding.
During the program, 3 mobility events are held (Sevilla, Marsella, and Bologna), where some of the projects in the program are put together to network between them and with cultural actors from the host city. We were one of the selected projects to go from Valencia to Marseille mobility event, along with PhotOn Festival, Barret Cooperativa, La Cosecha, Russafa Escénica, Ikebanah Producciones, and Saltarinas.
During the 3 days where "Culture makes the world go round : rencontres professionnelles" (the mobility event in Marseille) took place, we had some activities aimed to do networking and find potential collaborators with the other 40 CCI projects from the various regions, and also some talks from the Chebec partners and European Union's Interreg MED fund.
The place where the mobility event was stunning: La Friche Belle de Mai. A former tobacco factory, La Friche is one of the most vibrant culture centers in Marseille and France. The space is huge, with various large exhibition rooms, theaters, rehearse rooms, concert halls, restaurants, a book shop, a skate park, and office and workshop spaces for nearly 70 cultural organizations. Among them is AMI (Aide aux Musiques Innovatrices), one of the chebec's partners.
We also had the chance to visit other cultural spaces in the city. We were lucky enough to get a exclusive guided tour on Marseille's FRAC (Contemporary Art Regional Fund). We could appreciate the architeture of Marseille's FRAC building, and see all the current exhibitions (there is no permanent collection at the FRACs), discovering interesting artists such as Cristof Yvoré or Nicolas Daubanes.
They where 4 pretty busy days, but we discovered Marseille as a vibrant city full of artistic and creative initiatives, with significant players. We got to meet lots of visual, scenic, and music arts projects from Barcelona, Sevilla, Évora, Bolonia, Roma, Lyon, Marsella, and Sarajevo. The CHEBEC program keeps on: right now, we are on the mentoring phase, in order to build our internationalization plan. We'll keep you posted!
08 Oct 2019
We are back! We know that it has ben a while since we last published on this blog, but we have been getting some new stuff ready, and we did two short trips to Marseille (as part of European Union's CHEBEC program) and to Colombia (as part of the RedEmprendia Landing program), aside from being part of Prime The Animation 2019. We are building content to tell you all that we did and learnt there, but meanwhile.. it is Inktober already!!
As we did last year, we created a special index in "Discover Artists" to showcase all the inktober works from our users.
To be shown there, just upload your inktober works to your portfolio website, go to "Edit" on each picture and tag it with the "inktober2019" (no need to put #) tag in "Tags".
And, as we did last year we will be giving away one year of PRO Plan for free to the artist whose work has the most likes in that list. To allow everyone to have enough time to upload everything and receive likes, we will be waiting until 15th of November to find the winner.
No matter if you follow the original Inktober by Jake Parker, or maybe Catalina Novelli's version, or your own Inktober: the main goal is to learn and share!
We hope to see your work, and Happy Inktober!
01 Jul 2019
It is summer, the heat has come, and in Drawfolio is time to launch 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 51,95$ instead of 75$.
10 Jun 2019
We are bringing today something special for our PRO customers. These years we focused in steadily improving Drawfolio as a product, and although we launched "Discover Artists" and we promote our users on our blog and social media, we were not building much of a community between our users.
That's why, after talking to some of our PRO customers and validating the idea made sense, we are making the first step launching the Drawfolio Community Slack. We hope this will enable our PROs to build networks, share ideas and knowledge, and get to know each other.
If you don't know what Slack is, a brief summary: it is basically a private chat you can use via a web browser or mobile app, focused on team colaboration. Aside from the most familiar, whatsapp-like features (like chat, emojis, sharing videos and images), you can create new chat rooms, conversation threads, surveys, and much more.
If you are on PRO Plan, you should have an email with a private link to register into our Drawfolio Community Slack. If you don't find it, or have any problem registering into it, please contact us at uservoice or write us at [email protected].
See you on Drawfolio Community!
