The Roadmap & Community section
3yr
Dan B
Just wondering what thoughts are on what’s coming from the roadmap and where the community sees priority needs? I think a lot of people have dropped off the community section (?) but I’d like to see them back and see see it really thrive and grow here (aside the courses and challenges which are already great).
My thoughts on what is missing at the moment:
- to be notified when someone you follow posts work to their album, possibly by also setting up dedicated published vs WIP albums
- Commenting on albums/personal walls
- Sketchbooks/journals, for members to track their progress through the courses, general art progress and thoughts, again with notifications
- a dedicated critique section (like the ‘ask for help’ checkbox but it’s allowed in community/personal wall posts)
- News - particularly Proko site/course news, but also somewhere for members to post Art related news/content for discussion, like a bulletin board
- Personal messages and/or group chat
- Maybe a few sub-categories in the Community section, though I’m not sure how deep or wide to go depending on how active it is. Could even add tags or something to allow searching/pseudo-categorisation.
Keep up the great work, the content here is fantastic and I look forward to the future developments and growth.
Chat is the most important thing for me, and something that would likely keep me coming back for longer. I have no artsy real life friends with whom I can talk to about progress, or just art in general so as I'm working on assignments, eventually I feel the need for social interaction and that takes me away from doing art. Forums are very structured so it doesn't fulfill the need for like-minded company when doing art. Group chats could do that.
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3yr
Wanted to also echo @Katey Jensma and say thanks for the valuable feedback. The Proko news is a great idea and we're trying to figure out a section of the site to put our press releases.
When it comes to notifications I also get where you're coming from. I've talked with Stan about making the Proko app a priority. I know that it would be great if you could get notified on your phone when someone leaves a comment.
@Dan B and @Yiming Wu Thank you so much for all of this useful feedback. We have a lot of big improvements planned for the community and feedback like this is extremely important! Thank you for being part of the new community on Proko, we really hope you enjoy what we have in store for you guys :)
Hi there Dan!
Yeah I would think commenting on the album of each other can be a great thing... OR... let's just make every update into a community thread, just like twitter but more "threaded", like if you post a gallery image, it's automatically represented as a thread in the community. And then you can have various filters and so on. It makes implementation easy because it's basically the same type underneath. My own website (ChengduLittleA.com) is coded in that way and it's super simple and flexible.
And actually I think the problem is not really about the platform feature. Recently I've realized more that artists are simply too different from one another. It's quite hard to get excited about another people's art if you just don't have the same feeling of this subject matter and so on. That's why deviant art has such a huge user base but you still struggle to only find a handful of artists whose work you really like.
Another reason is maybe we don't like to be like on a mass platform? I mean artists are more likely to be somewhat "alternative". To have a defined way to gather those people is probably not preferred.
Thus I think what could beneficial artists greatly is we could really have a web-ring or to put it in another way, a centralized index/directory, where artists write down or categorize their "type" with some demo images, and simply it links to their own website/blog/social. Better yet to make it a protocol where people can choose what they view and connect with, or maybe just a enhanced rss thing. This could be a new "source book" thing?
That's a good point, but I think it can be done differently here. Through the courses people can 'request help' and create new topics etc in the community section. While a general 'gallery browser' would probably be great (i.e. like ArtStation), I think the key is here you'll only get the stream of posts from people you already follow (perhaps with recommendation if Proko are working towards AI features?), so it should already be tailored to artists whose style you like.
Where artstation is a portfolio 'show-off' site for aspiring artists (I see it as Flickr for artists), it entirely lacks the critique/guidance side that is Proko's strength, particularly if the instructors here are involved in the critiques and posting of works.
You already can choose your interests here, which would help with the gallery filters.
I know what you mean about getting excited by other people's art, but take me for instance, I'm quite focused on creatures and insects, but yet I follow a range of people because I like their style. This means I would probably appreciate their critiques and input even if the subject matter is diverse.
I see Proko growing as a central learning platform for art. Sure, you can link off to Artstation, Instagram etc for your 'Portfolio display' or a blog for other content, but for artistic development Proko would become central. This is why I really hope to see the instructors get involved in the community as the features grow, as that would create the competitive advantage over things like Discord groups, etc.
But hey, I'm old school in a way, I still think forums are the best forms of structured communication and sharing :/
