FilterFoundry Brings Visually Creative Professionals Together
Making it as a professional artists, of any kind, can be incredibly difficult. The avenues into employment often seen obscure and esoteric in nature, with people finding it hard to get noticed by prospective clients. This is because large scale publishers and design agencies have their own ways of recruiting creative workers, whilst companies who may need to hire the occasional freelancer often have no idea where to look in order to find someone with the appropriate skill set.
FilterFoundery.com hopes to solve these problems, by providing the first social networking site totally dedicated to visually creative professionals. Supplying an online home for artists, designers, photographers, video editors and the like.
It does this by not only providing individuals with a place to showcase their work and make contacts with other people within their field, but also by posting news and tutorials from respected industry insiders (from amongst various creative disciples). The site also collects people’s resume’s, so that prospective employers have all the information they need to headhunt prospective employee’s and freelancers. As an added bonus FilterFoundry also provide a secure online shopping environment through which members can sell their art.
Anyone can easily browse through the site, as all content is publicly viewable. The search function lets people look for either specific kinds of images, films and individual artists personal work pads (profiles with online portfolios). Members are able to follow other members, making it simple for users to communicate with each other on site (via the usual private messaging and commenting options), whilst also giving prospective employers an easy way to keep track of people they are interested in.
Like most social networking sites, FilterFoundry is primarily free for its users, being partially sponsored through money bought in by advertizing. However, if people want to sell via the sites shop then FilterFoundry will take a cut of the profits (percentages vary depending on the item in question). In addition there is a scalable paid subscription model, which gives the users the ability to store their visual work directly on the website, with prices starting at $9.95 per month for 10GB of storage.
What makes FilterFoundry stand out from other websites that are trying to hop on the specialized social networking bandwagon, is that it’s working hard to not only establish itself as a networking site, but also as a learning resource center for visually creative professionals, as well as a place where people can find low cost, high quality stock images and footage.
All of these things together make FilterFoundry a very attractive prospect for artists of all sorts, which is probably how they’ve managed to build a thriving community in such a short space of time. Definitely a site worth looking into if you work in this field, or if you need to find someone who does.
