Website Construction for Visual Artists

Digitize your work!

Website or no website, this is probably the most important step in being able to use the Internet to promote your own activities.

Large-scale documentation

When documenting your work with a digital camera or flatbed scanner, always save the largest file you can, ideally at 300 DPI. These files will be necessary to anyone who needs images of your work for print media. They are generally stored as Photoshop (.psd) files, TIFF files, EPS files (for vector art) or high-quality JPEG's.

Web-ready documentation

Once you have the large-scale documentation as your source material, you are ready to make copies that are appropriate for the Web, or for emailing. Images should be reduced to 72 DPI (to conform to most monitors), and reduced to a much smaller scale (typically, hundreds of pixels in either direction, rather than thousands). This is one of the most common errors committed by people attempting to use the Internet to share imagery, and the culprit of many slow-loading images that don't fit within the confines of the screen.

Here's more on creating image files

As with your resumé, having an arsenal of artwork images that can be easily emailed is something you'll want to take care of ahead of time, not the same day that these materials are requested.

Here's a shortcut-- although not a perfect substitute: to use an image-sharing network (like Flickr or Picasa) to do the reformatting for you. Systems such as these generally employ algorithms to reduce the filesize and dimensions of uploaded images, and assume that their users aren't fluent in image-editing software. You can then download the new image version that has been created for you.

Wikipedia: photo sharing websites

Video files

Video documentation should be exported in Web-ready formats such as Quicktime (.mov), MPEG (.mpg, .mp4) or Flash (.flv). Ideally, video files should stay within a few megabytes for quicker downloading.

Here's more on video files


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