About the upcoming contest

[RayTracedObserver]

Maybe this is a risk that has already been thought of. I just wanted to say that if the graphic contest uses users as judges then it should strictly forbid any kind of meme content. Because the obvious risk is that some meme communities will provide content and massively upvote it, resulting in some meme coin mascot being featured on the site...

I don't know if the contest will be only for homepage hero section background art or for other assets as well. But if there is a system in place to randomly rotate between a selection of good artwork, then maybe it's ok to allow some meme content, because being displayed only from time to time could be ok.

Also, I hope the contest will be open not only to static raster and vector images but also to dynamic and other kinetic or interactive art such as web-gl.

@katomm

[RayTracedObserver]

In fact it should probably be forbidden to promote any specific project.

[RayTracedObserver]

I must say that the foundation confuses me a bit with how things are dealt with... From my external point of view, as a simple blockchain enthusiast I imagine the foundation as a large organization with many members and a relatively large treasury (i am sure all of that info is online but I haven't looked for it). So I wonder why it feels like certain things move so slowly. Perhaps it's become too bureaucratic in its functioning ?

And I wonder why no one from the foundation attempted to discuss the details of the contest on here or another public platform before launching it. Not that it should have. But either things are done openly with community getting involved or they are not.

My first fear when I saw how short the contest was (and moreover during a holiday period), was that not many people would be able to participate and that there wouldn't be many quality submissions due to the time restraints. Which indeed ended up being the case.

If you had discussed about the contest details before launching it, I could have voiced those concerns and other people could have provided valuable insight.

Also it feels like the foundation didn't do much (or at least nothing that had much visibility or was successful) to promote the contest. Perhaps many attempts were done to get people to talk about it.

As a result not many people were aware of its existence. Now it's ok, nobody is perfect, do not worry about past failures. They're just opportunities to learn and do better.

Are there any new plans to make the website more welcoming and attractive ? A new contest ? Or the hiring of professional web designers or graphic artists ?

Or surely in the meantime someone would be geeky enough to at least update the code that generated the current background image to make it non pixellized. I mean, you have some money at your disposal. You could even hire someone on fiverr or another job platform to fix and improve the code for the original web gl visualizer if your own geeks and devs are too busy working on other projects...

There are so many possibilities. Be creative and don't be too afraid to fail.

---

A few ideas :

1 contact one or several reputable design schools and present this as an opportunity for students to create something cool and meaningful that they'll be proud to show off in their portfolio of works if their work gets selected and used. Teachers in design school often make them work on art for fictitious projects, so why not have them work on some real art for a real open source project instead.

2 Contact some trendy designers, ask them how they work and what there prices are.

3 Don't contact big soulless corporate ad agencies which risk not doing a good job while being very expensive. Unless they are directed by someone that is very passionately driven and cares about the results rather than just about being paid.

4 Have a permanent small button to submit art on the website, with the opportunity to be displayed. Like a permanent contest. In some ways the GitHub icon is exactly that already. But life is all about narrative and how things are told and presented. So a specific submit art button would be easier to understand and attract different people.

5 Like I said in a previous message. Art can be rotated. No need to have always the same one on each page load. If you've ever used wetransfer for sending files, it's sort of neat how art and ads are displayed and rotated, with a little cartel description text similarly to a museum or art book (at least it was like that the last time I used wetransfer, it may have changed since then).

5 Heck, go crazy and set up a way to vote on chain for which art can be displayed or not on the mainpage. With lots of rules to prevent abuse, memes and distasteful jokes getting displayed.

6. Search the web for cool webGL or other types of interactive and non interactive static or kinetic art and individually contact artists asking them to make something for cardano and pay them. This might actually be the idea that makes the most sense. And it's seems easy to be put into practice.

Be open to all types of art and don't necessarily favor excessively geeky interactive visualizations. Hand drawn abstract 2D art could very well be equally suited for this just as much as extremely rational art. Just go with what brings you excitement. If it's rational interactive or kinetic visualization of the blockchain, then so be it. If it's an artist's hand drawn surreal view of what a blockchain powered human society could look like then that's great as well.

Avoid AI art. While it's cool I personally think it's better to feature real artists for various reasons. One of them being that in this new era of AI, the main challenge we are facing is to keep and develop our humaneness and compassion for one another.

Which I think is only possible if we continue to make art ourselves rather than to delegate that task to the robots. However this can be debated as AI art can be a collaboration between humans and AI and the lines between what is synthetically made and what is organically made get blurry very fast. But anyway you probably get the point.

No one wants low effort art generated with one prompt...

Thank you for reading.

@katomm

[RayTracedObserver]

Also, I have no doubts that the foundation is actually building many amazing things in the background. Things that are not necessarily visible to a simple blockchain user like me. So pardon my ignorant criticism of the foundation. I know that employees must all be very busy at their own tasks.

And please tell us if there is anything interesting planned for the future of the website.

Thank you :)