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Published: September 5th, 2011 by Jeremy Daalder

Crowd Funding for Creative Projects

Crowd funding is all the rage lately and while it has resulted in far too many naff iPhone accessories, there’s also been some really interesting uses for some really interesting projects.  (If you don’t know crowd funding- see Wikipedia page on Crowd Funding)

One area that is really only just starting with this is creative projects – we had a visit really from a lovely guy called Jeremy Kool and he’s the first artist we know of to really work the crowd funding side of things.  He’s doing this not by simply begging for funidng, but is essentially pre-selling fine art prints to fund his eBook project. This is an idea we can really see taking off – as long as the artists involved really put their best foot forward and leverage the power of social marketing to get the eyeball traffic required to make these things successful.  To me the fact this project is already 85% funded after only a few days is a clear sign that all the doom and gloom in the press is over-stated – people are still spending and art is still a place they want to spend, but some of the traditional models are just not working with the younger crowd.  I’d say ignore this market at your peril because the IT savvy twitter generation would seem to be where a fair proportion of disposable income is to be found.

It’s an awesome idea – using crowd funding for a creative project – and he’s approaching it very well indeed.  He’s done his research and test works – he approached us with a very solid body of work already in hand – and he’s had some test prints done so he’s worked out all his costing etc.  It’s really nice to see an artist who is really prepared and doing the appropriate ground work for the business side as well – all too many artists expect the business side to just magically take care of itself, when in reality the really successful people in art are the ones who take the business side seriously as well.

Jeremy’s style is modern and original – while the artwork is in fact wholly digitally originated, it looks like origami/paper art.  I’ve never seen anything quite like it and I really like it – he’s got a great eye for character and you can really see how he can build a world out of this style that will be both distinctive and beautiful.

Below you can see some of the test prints and some of the character designs for the eBook, plus a full test scene.  Why not check out (maybe even sponsor)  the project’s Pozible page (Pozible is an Australian friendly version of KickStarter, basically), or the project’s blog – you can see from the overall level of professionalism on show that the project is in very good hands indeed.  We’re really looking forward to seeing the end product.

(All images (C) Jeremy Kool, of course).

 

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2011 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Image Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

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