Deviant Art
Written by Anna Andreen Wednesday, 14 January 2009 23:45
Because I've grown up creating art, I'm a big fan of deviantart.com. It's a place for artists to post their work, sell it, buy it, create a network of online art-buddies, participate in contests, blog, and it even has a news feature of topics mostly related to art. It may seem overwhelming at first, just hearing about all its multiple functions, but it's actually pretty organized. The homepage has thumbnails of Most Popular Art submitted in 24 hours, the tabs at the top can change the time frame (anywhere from 8 hours ago to 'way back') or change the setting to Newest Art. The sidebar has options to choose a certain genre of art, if the user wants to focus their search or browsing as well. There is a search bar at the top, so art work tagged by the artist with certain words will pop up when those keywords are searched. If the user has an account and sees an image they like then they can easily click and drag this thumbnail into their favorites (this comes in handy when there are multiple works that the user wants to visit, but doesn't want to risk losing them if the page is refreshed when viewing a work up close). Friends found on the site can also be added to a buddy list where there is a chat function and artists can market and sell their works through deviant art.
All of this is set on a basic gray background which does not distract from the artwork itself, since that is the main attraction. And, though much of this site is image-based, it doesn't take long to load (unless maybe the artist decided to attatch a huge resolution image). And navigation, at least for me, is pretty simple and straight-forward. No obnoxious amounts of glitz and glamour and fairly convenient when I'm just browsing through recent works or a certain genre. I'd say this falls into the Usability Era, excluding the fact that the focus of the site is images. I find it easy to navigate and rarely run into loading problems, even with enlarged versions of the artwork loaded onto the site.