Blog Post 5: Social Media and Your Career

It’s pretty common knowledge these days that social media is a vital aspect in getting your work out there, promoting it, forming connections, finding a niche and all that fun stuff. That’s what the lecture covered this week, and it explored techniques for self promotion, professionalism, popularity and portfolios.

Out of the objectives in the lecture I can fulfill with social media, valuable feedback, networking, and building/joining a community are the most relevant to me currently, I feel. I have a DeviantArt and Tumblr account which cover the above goals fairly well, but I also see the benefit in joining Twitter and Polycount, as well as smaller art and animation forums. I only have a tiny following right now of mostly people I know from school, so I have to work on boosting that, as much as I like the coziness of my quiet little corner of the internet! The biggest hurdle for me is a lack of community engagement. I’ve grown into the habit of posting my own work but not going out of my way to connect with others or groups, so that’s something I’ll definitely have to get used to. There’s always room for improving my skills as well!

Lisa from Lachri Fine art on Youtube has a many videos with tips on using social media as a platform for art. In this video she explains ways you can expand your audience.

I currently use an alias because I am more comfortable with using that in web spaces that are completely public, which is basically everywhere except Facebook, where I at least have some control of who sees my posts. I don’t really think using an alias will affect my professional identity all that much, seeing as there are many professional artists and animators that do the same, though I’ll attach my name to it down the line if I feel the need. I also don’t really see the point of creating separate accounts for projects. I’d rather hear subjective accounts from the creators themselves rather than the impersonal updates that tend to come from project or company specific accounts.

In regards to professionalism and popularity, I’ve been lurking on the internet for long enough that so far I’ve been able learn from others mistakes before creating them myself, thankfully.

I’m looking forward to setting up a portfolio! Right now it will just scream ‘amateur’ but it’ll be good to have ready when my work is of a quality worth hiring.

And since this is about self promotion, I guess I better get some practice in! Here’s my DeviantArt and Tumblr and some art:

Dena, C. (2015). Week 6: Social Media and Your Career Self-Directed Practitioners Retrieved from: https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-6-social-media-and-your-career-21ec52b2b003

Clough, L. (2015). 5 ways to get more followers for your art on social media - w/ Lachri. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/E2odgLkxZA4

Blog Post 4: Inclusive Design

This week we covered inclusive design! In other words, not isolating people from your potential audience. It’s something that I find is a very important yet largely overlooked aspect of media. The lecture covered accessibility, race, gender, sexuality, and conflict styles and competition. I was fairly familiar with issues regarding accessibility and representation, but I was completely unfamiliar with conflict styles and competition, and found it really interesting.

As the lecture covered, there are many different ways to make media more accessible to to people in your audience that otherwise would have difficulties enjoying your creation to it’s fullest potential. There is often little reason not to make your design more inclusive. For example, basically every major piece of media that I can think of that includes visual and audio elements also has closed captioning, yet many games still fail to provide a setting or design that makes it accessible for color blind people, even when they’d usually only be simple changes to the visuals. When you consider that colour blindness effects roughly 10% of the male population, it seems really lackluster on the part of game developers. Cameron Gidari wrote an article on his experience playing video games as a colour blind person with a range of visual examples of games failing at this particular aspect of inclusive design

Hacking in Bioshock 2

Proper representation of demographics can allow large portions of your audience to feel more connected to your work, while without it you run the risk of isolating them. It was brought up in class how some people didn’t like the inclusion  or representation of social minorities in situations where it felt like they were just there to ‘tick a box.’ Honestly, if ticking a box means simply acknowledging the fact that the demographic exists and that they are complex and human and worthy of being represented, then I think that is reason enough. (A better argument would be why all the characters have to be Caucasian, straight and male, in my opinion.) Rebecca Sugar, the creator of my favourite cartoon ‘Steven Universe’ explains the importance of representation really well:

I think so much entertainment deals in those terms that almost everyone is left feeling abnormal if there’s anything specific about their life at all. I hope to represent people who have felt a lack of representation, but I hope to also show people who have felt represented that they can also relate to characters that are not heteronormative, and to families that are not traditional, maybe even more so than the more generic characters and families that they’ve been seeing on TV.

I haven’t given much thought to conflict and competition in regards to gender, though after reading the lecture it seems pretty obvious. I don’t really have any preferences with direct or indirect conflict in games but competition in jobs is something I identified with quite strongly. I would much rather the non-competitive option but I can’t even come up with a good reason why!

 Dena, C. (2015). Week 5: Inclusive Design Self-Directed Practitioners Retrieved from https://medium.com/self-directed-practitioners/week-12-inclusive-design-9df8f239653b

Gidari, C. (2015). What It's Like To Play Games When You're Colorblind. Kotaku. Retrieved 8 July 2015, from http://kotaku.com/what-its-like-to-play-games-when-youre-colorblind-1606030489

Woerner, M. (2015). Steven Universe Guidebook Spills The Secrets Of The Crystal Gems. io9. Retrieved 8 July 2015, from http://io9.com/steven-universe-guidebook-spills-the-secrets-of-the-cry-1704470546