Being an artist is difficult. Sculptors, painters, and photographers are constantly tiptoeing that tricky triad of making money, promoting work, and staying true to their creative voice.
Add in digital noise, fierce competition, and the randomness of being at the right place at the right time, and it becomes even harder to make it past the exhibition space of a friend’s living room.
But social media fixed everything, right? Because the magic of the Internet guarantees an eager audience. And readers love being bombarded with shameless streams of self-promotion. Plus, it’s easy to compete with dancing hamsters or a cat with its head stuck in a loaf of bread.
That’s right, competition for online attention spans is fierce.
Lucky for today’s artists, platforms like ArtSquare are letting creatives break through all the online babble. Founded by Thomas Griffin, the popular platform has become a one-stop shop that provides storage, management, exposure, and support for professional artists.
The result? Artist can show off their work to a wider audience with little or no technical knowledge.
Putting artists in the spotlight
Like any portfolio-based platform, ArtSquare can only succeed if its artists are successfully promoted. Otherwise, it’s just a podium with a muted microphone.
So to publicize its user base and rich stash of paintings, ArtSquare turned to Typeform to power the submission process for Behind the Canvas.
Part of the site’s “ArtSquare Academy,” Behind the Canvas articles feature notable artists and their work—pulling back the curtain on creative processes, career paths, and the inspiration behind remarkable paintings. The strategy? Drive community engagement across the platform.
But that still leaves two important things to figure out: how to collect and manage content.
“Anytime you’re working with visual artists, design becomes extremely important.”
To be featured on the site, artists apply by filling out the company’s sleek-looking interview typeform. The online form’s conversational style lets users quickly include background information and upload photos of their work.
Here’s Thomas on how Typeform handles his needs:
“Typeform, out of the box, maintains a casual and delightful feel. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it works—a good portion of how we interact with our users is now built entirely around the product.”
Simpler submissions for smoother workflows
For ArtSquare’s editorial staff, the streamlined collection process also cuts story curation down to three easy steps:
Download information and photos from Typeform
Edit user answers
Publish story to website
Promoting the submission process is also super easy. ArtSquare simply places a link to the interview typeform above every article and shares the link on social channels to cultivate interest—bringing users straight into the platform. And what artist wouldn’t want to be featured before a large audience of peers and potential buyers?
Thomas on his favorite part of the process:
“Using Typeform’s File Upload feature has been clutch for us because it saves so much time. Hunting down images from every user would be a total nightmare.”
And what about results?
“We got about 200 applicants in just the first couple of months. It’s been a great pull strategy for the platform and an easy way to populate our website with amazing portfolios.”
But wait, there’s more
ArtSquare didn’t stop there. Since launching Behind the Canvas, the site has grown. And how did ArtSquare scale? By adding more typeforms of course!
Leveraging Typeform’s simple submission process, they easily added more content—meaning more talent housed within the platform. Nice formula guys.
Here’s more examples of how ArtSquare uses Typeform to run their site:
The digitizer recruitment tool lets ArtSquare easily recruit digitizers to capture paintings in digital format.
The brand’s Academy contributors typeform lets potential contributors submit article proposals to the ArtSquare blog.
The ArtChat registration typeform lets users join an online community where artists, professionals, and art business experts from around the world can interact.
To attract top talent, ArtSquare designed a Careers recruitment typeform as the first step in its employee recruitment process.
Intuitive, colorful, and easy to promote. ArtSquare has taken content curation to an entirely new level of “wow!” In business, we call that innovation. At Typeform, that’s known as a formidable effort. Well done Thomas and team.
Do you have a similar project in the pipeline? Need to quickly collect and manage content from your user base? See the how-to tips below to learn how ArtSquare did it, or get started right away.
How did Thomas do it?
1) Use Logic Jumps to customize the screens people see
Do you need to send respondents to different questions, depending on the responses they give? Then you need to use Logic Jump.
2) Let users upload files
Tracking down files for portfolios, content curation, or job applications can be a real productivity burn. Save time for both yourself and your users by letting people submit everything in the same place using a File upload question.
3) Customize the Thank You screen
Add text, links, an image, video, or even an animated GIF to show your appreciation. Want to say something extra special after someone submits their responses? Then consider customizing the Thank You screen.
4) Set up Self notifications, so you know when people answer
Are you checking your results page every two minutes to see if someone answered? Stop! Set up Self notifications instead. You can get answers to specific questions, or every question, sent straight to your email.
And of course let us know if you have any questions! Our team is always here to help.