Patience please

Just in case everyone is still wondering, we are still working on some coding issues with Art Life Collective.

The big moves here will be aimed at making Art Life Collective more accessible both for our artists and people looking to buy custom designer t-shirts.

We are still putting the final tweaks to the code, but are just about ready to change the site.

And, once again, one thing we need all of our artists to do, if you have not done so already, is to make sure all of your works are titled and you have filled in the description sections for your shirts. This is necessary for the search engines to be able to point customers you way.

Also, we have had a bunch of luck lately with commercial designs. One of the things, though, that we have run into (I'm one of the ones who made this mistake with one of my designs) is to make images the appropriate size and dpi. Simple designs can get away with lower dpi and such, but the more complicated your design is, the more resolution we need on the site. And don't go below 170. The images, even simple ones, start to fall apart.

We have a couple of graphic artists, including myself, who are part of the ALC team and will be happy to help anyone with solutions to design questions or problems.
So, just let us know.

Featured artist for the Week: Bazzah

Bazzah is another one of Art Life Collective's custom t-shirt designers who has been with the site for the majority of its inception. Their designs lean towards the artistic side and are a strong standout among our contributors.

Artist Bio: My art stems from both extremes of human emotion: peace and harmony to the horrors of darkness and desolation. I use these themes creatively to invoke something both shocking and pleasing to the eye. My designs are reproduced in a large-scale format, meshing a wide variety of mediums including but not limited to: oil-pastels, charcoals, pencils, paints and photography. All elements are then combined into a portrait digitally.

Featured artist for the Week: olive47

olive47 has done everything from giving life to a fake online cult (which needed a disclaimer since the mouth-breathing section of the public thought it was real) that uses sodium pentathol in all of its cooking to creating artwork and has been featured in Peel Magazine.

Her artist bio says it better that I could (even after eating some multiprism pancakes): "olive47 hails from the west coast, u.s.a. she likes small non-threatening mammals, magenta, mr. ramen, painting walls, cute portuguese boys, dub music, pancake parties, and white middle-class kids who pretend to be gangstas. she was once rumoured to be the bastard daughter of tammy faye bakker, and her friends tell her she's a good dancer. she might be in love with you."

Check out her Web site here
Join the cult here

Arrrrgh, Spammers beware

We have updated the Art Life Collective t-shirt designer and artist forum. Everything should be about the same for our users, but we have put a few extra barriers in place for spammers. I don't expect it to stop them completely, but it has stemmed the tide for now.

The only thing that may change for the artists at Art Life Collective on the forum is you may have to re-enter you name and password, since most of the cookies, certificates and such will have changed.

Also, ALC may be a bit on the buggy side for a little while. We are in the process of doing a major makeover for the site and some coding issues may crop up. The Art Life Collective team will be on hand to help with any problems that do crop up. Please report any problems (sooner better than later) to graham@artlifecollective.com or chris@artlifecollective.com.

Featured artist for the Week: Jamey Weare

This week, hats are off to Jamey Weare, if for no other reason than his War is Sexy? shirt design. The artwork is outstanding, and the message he is sending is solid.
Not one of Art Life Collective's more prolific artists, Weare (who is one of those rare multi-talented individuals whose abilities cover the whole creative spectrum) certainly makes up for quantity with quality.

Again, he has been with ALC almost since the beginning, and his War is Sexy? shirts is one of the more popular designs.

Other artists take note here: If you want stuff to sell well, make sure the design is high quality and that it appeals to people. That seems to be the running theme so far with all of our featured artists.

Featured artist for the Week: Edward Ferrusquia

Of all Art Life Collective's t-shirt artists and designers, Edward Ferrusquia has been one of the consistently most popular. That's probably because he has worked out an agreement with My Way Entertainment to use their I'm the Juggernaut, Bitch spoof of the X-men cartoons. He has several shirts for My Way and ALC is home to the official My Way Entertainment page.

The amazing Mr. E has also been with the company from it's inception, and there is something to be said for loyalty -- actually, a lot can be said.
Props E. Keep 'em coming.

Featured artist for the Week: Social Zombie

Since we are busy redesigning and upgrading our custom t-shirt and artist design site, Art Life Collective, and we a pushing 1,000 pieces of art, we have decided to start featuring artists of the week -- people who have been active both in the Art Life Collective project and on our T-shirt Artist Forums.

First out of the gate -- there is just something darkly appealing about the humor here (I about bought the "crayons and paste taste good" shirt for my art teacher wife before I caught the "teacher touched me" scribbled in the background. Still might need to get that one, for me to wear at home) -- is Social Zombie.

me friends with simian iodine,grewaarr! he say this good place to be! make design buy design support artists... or me eat you up!

Ex military scientific experiment gone awry...#06266/00 Neoplastic nanothread DNA recode and development project. After several failed attempts to recode DNA structure and introduce the neoplastic and nanothread technology the subject had become somewhat irrational and non responsive to agreed upon testing. AFter 3 years of military hospital rehab subject #06266 has been deemed fit for introduction back into the public. Subject is required to take daily primordialesopleen spleen and DNA injections to balance small psychotic episodes brought on by man made lighting and processed foods. The military has found these small drawbacks to the subjects condition to be of little concern or threat to the public at large.

Most popular artist of the week, according to page views: Ryager2704

ALC custom shirt site redesign

We are in the process of redesigning the site for Art Life Collective, so, all our custom t-shirt designers and artists, please report any bugs you run across. We humbly beg your forgiveness for any inconvenience. We would fall on our swords, but there are only a handful of us here, so things would end pretty quickly.

Seriously, though, we have been paying attention to the survey we sent out and now have a million things we want to improve. A couple topping the list are a faster loading front page and making it more user friendly. We also are going to be addressing the transparency issue with the preview boxes that makes it hard to see dark vector designs in those spaces. This has not been a huge issue, since the images show up on the shirts, but it does make browsing the gallery a less than perfect experience.

We are really looking to improve things for both our contributing artists and other shirt designers and think everyone will be pleased with the changes.
Now, there are a few things artists need to do -- if they want to optimize their traffic and really get the full use of what ALC brings to the table -- is to make sure they are not only titling their designs, but filling in the shirt descriptions so our on-site search engine can find them. That's what people looking for specific artwork and shirts use to browse Art Life Collective ... or any site. It only takes a few seconds to do, soo DO IT, at least if you want your images searchable.

This is not just about directing buyers to your shirts, but people to your art. Most of our artists have distinctive styles, that, if their descriptions are accurate, should send people to their pages and work, which often links to other of their works of site and so on.

Also, remember, anyone having any problems or needs any help, please let us know, either to me, graham@artlifecollective.com, or info@artlifecollective.com or post the issue on our t-shirt forums for artists. What ever we can do to help, we will.

Again, the ALC team appreciates everyone who took the time to fill out the surveys and let us know what you want. We are going to implement a serious number of those changes over the next few weeks or so. Anyone who has additional suggestions, feel free to contact us at the above listings and give us a heads up.
Thanks