The Commission Me Project

The official tumblr of the Commission Me Project. We will be posting updates about the site and forums here. If you have any questions about the project, please contact us either here or on our forums. Official Tag: #cm project

[provinite]

Full database design for the Character DB subsystem of CM is completed!

Going into a private beta for that soon.

If I can get an EER diagram drawn up, I’ll post that tonight.

[thecmproject]

Just a small update. We're still going here at CM, even if we've been a bit out of touch lately. Living life, keeping extra busy with cons, life, medical stuff, work, etc.

But don't worry, still making steady progress!

[thecmproject]

Yeah, here's a question: Why don't you drop the family oriented righteous bullshit and let us have a more secluded community oriented place where we can talk like adults and share our dirty art to our hearts' contentment. Tumblr seems to have a real problem keeping kids away from the smut.

I'm not really sure what you're addressing when you say family-oriented. Our goal is to make a professional space for artists and commissioners to work together. With that in mind, it doesn't make sense for us to excessively limit what type of content is allowed on our site.

NSFW/Adult/Explicit content is a very large portion of the commission artwork community, and we would be remiss to not allow it. However, we are not planning on catering to any one group, genre, style, or rating. If you want to do nsfw art, that's great. It will be required to be tagged appropriately. In this way, it can be limited to only those willing and legally able to view adult works.

It is obviously completely impossible to keep children 100% out of smutty content if they go digging for it, but there is no reason that it needs to be showing up to unregistered users, or anyone who has not explicity allowed NSFW works to show up for them.

[thecmproject]

Hello! Love the site idea! It'd make things so much easier. Will you be offering any third party services such as payment reimbursement for cancellations or tax reporting for members who qualify? Would you also be doing any form of debt collection for commissioners who do not pay?

These are things that we would like to do, but are not really feasible right now. It would be great to do a bit more guaranteeing and be more involved in the payment processing, but that is a lot of responsibility and legalities that we are not quite able to manage right now.

Additionally, we do not have the capital to back payments. We are funding this project ourselves currently, and will likely be doing some sort of kickstarter-esque campaign once we have a more finished product.

However, we are hoping that a rating system will help to weed out unreliable commissioners (as well as artists). But that's about the best that we can offer for now. As far as helping with taxes, that is definitely a possibility if artists log all of their payments in our system, a downloadable spreadsheet/export of some kind is not unrealistic.

[thecmproject]

Will the site take a percentage of the artist's sales? Or will it rely on adspace (possibly rented out by artists) and donations?

Glad you asked!

At this point, we have no intention of collecting a percentage of artist's sales. The plan is to make the site self-sufficient through a combination of adspace (also available to be rented by artists, yes), donations, and premium account features.

[thecmproject]

Offical CommissionMe Project Tag

Just letting everyone know, the official tag of the CM Project is

#cm project

Thanks everyone. Night time for now, we'll be back at it in the morning!

[thecmproject]

Hi everyone! I’m Tucker the pinhog, and I’m here to reveal a new community endeavor called The CM Project. The goal of this project is to design a better place for artists of all kinds and commissioners to connect with one-another. We want your help to create a place for artists to showcase their works, and offer commission slots.

So we have decided on the name CommissionMe.net. This will be a gallery site, commission management system, and social networking platform. But we don’t know exactly what everyone would want in a new site. So we have opened public forums for everyone to share their ideas.

The site is in extremely early closed alpha right now. We have opened the forums at this point so that the community can build the site from the ground up. We need your input! The goal here is a site FOR the community BY the community!

More information under the cut!

Read More

[clovercoin]

We finally have information posted about The CM Project!

Also links to the forums on the blog page. We hope all you artsy / creative folk out there will take a moment to read what we hope to accomplish and even put in your 2 cents at our Alpha stage forums while we build the site from scratch!

You’ll be hearing a lot more about this on a much more regular basis from me and Prov so be prepared! :D

[bouncybat]

This sounds really promising, so long as the artist’s rights to their work is protected!

[thecmproject]

Always! We hope to even have helpful guides to making your very own TOS and AUP so everyone can customize exactly how they personally wish for their work to be used!

[provinite]

Absolutely, artist’s rights are extremely important to us. Everyone will have to have a TOS and such, but we’re hoping to have some excellent default ones that will protect artists and their work. We won’t be doing anyone any good otherwise.

[strangelyindecisive]

I think what that person is commenting on is what happened with the corgi art site. How it gave the client the rights to make money on any piece they commissioned from artist without paying them any money ( past what they paid to commission them) I’m paraphrasing but that’s what I understood. 

[provinite]

I figured. The current plan is for each artist to be able to provide their own license. We do not agree with ArtCorgi’s licensing, and the built-in commission terms will definitely reflect that.

We believe unless licensing is purchased separately from the artwork, the artist should retain all rights.

[thecmproject]

Are you guys looking for more help (more admin, administrators, designers, etc) ? I love this idea and I would be open to submit time/art/concepts for the final design.

ABSOLUTELY! This is why we've opened up the forums! Currently we are looking for any and all input on any facet of the site. In time, we'll have to look at adding more staff, and they will definitely be coming from the forums. So if you haven't already, please sign up over at

http://forums.commissionme.net 

Thanks so much!

[thecmproject]

Here is the very first work up of the website! Obviously we're open to suggestions and discussion on the forums how to better design the website. But we thought it would be fun to share the very first draft here with all our new followers.

[thecmproject]

Hi everyone! I’m Tucker the pinhog, and I’m here to reveal a new community endeavor called The CM Project. The goal of this project is to design a better place for artists of all kinds and commissioners to connect with one-another. We want your help to create a place for artists to showcase their works, and offer commission slots.

So we have decided on the name CommissionMe.net. This will be a gallery site, commission management system, and social networking platform. But we don’t know exactly what everyone would want in a new site. So we have opened public forums for everyone to share their ideas.

The site is in extremely early closed alpha right now. We have opened the forums at this point so that the community can build the site from the ground up. We need your input! The goal here is a site FOR the community BY the community!

More information under the cut!

Read More

[clovercoin]

We finally have information posted about The CM Project!

Also links to the forums on the blog page. We hope all you artsy / creative folk out there will take a moment to read what we hope to accomplish and even put in your 2 cents at our Alpha stage forums while we build the site from scratch!

You’ll be hearing a lot more about this on a much more regular basis from me and Prov so be prepared! :D

[derpynirvash]

If you need a cost effective web server (read: probably free) I run quite a large one for my site, and would be happy to give you space.

[thecmproject]

Oh my gosh that would be fantastic. We are currently running off of a standard webhost, and Prov will be building a server to have hosted later. However, during alpha/beta stages that might be kind of amazing since obviously funds are pretty tight. We'd love to talk to you about this more, send a PM with your skype info or however you'd like to chat!

[thecmproject]

Hi everyone! I’m Tucker the pinhog, and I’m here to reveal a new community endeavor called The CM Project. The goal of this project is to design a better place for artists of all kinds and commissioners to connect with one-another. We want your help to create a place for artists to showcase their works, and offer commission slots.

So we have decided on the name CommissionMe.net. This will be a gallery site, commission management system, and social networking platform. But we don’t know exactly what everyone would want in a new site. So we have opened public forums for everyone to share their ideas.

The site is in extremely early closed alpha right now. We have opened the forums at this point so that the community can build the site from the ground up. We need your input! The goal here is a site FOR the community BY the community!

More information under the cut!

Read More

[clovercoin]

We finally have information posted about The CM Project!

Also links to the forums on the blog page. We hope all you artsy / creative folk out there will take a moment to read what we hope to accomplish and even put in your 2 cents at our Alpha stage forums while we build the site from scratch!

You’ll be hearing a lot more about this on a much more regular basis from me and Prov so be prepared! :D

[bouncybat]

This sounds really promising, so long as the artist’s rights to their work is protected!

[thecmproject]

Always! We hope to even have helpful guides to making your very own TOS and AUP so everyone can customize exactly how they personally wish for their work to be used!

[thecmproject]

Hi everyone! I'm Tucker the pinhog, and I'm here to reveal a new community endeavor called The CM Project. The goal of this project is to design a better place for artists of all kinds and commissioners to connect with one-another. We want your help to create a place for artists to showcase their works, and offer commission slots.

So we have decided on the name CommissionMe.net. This will be a gallery site, commission management system, and social networking platform. But we don't know exactly what everyone would want in a new site. So we have opened public forums for everyone to share their ideas.

The site is in extremely early closed alpha right now. We have opened the forums at this point so that the community can build the site from the ground up. We need your input! The goal here is a site FOR the community BY the community!

More information under the cut!

In 2013, Prov made a commission queue website for AJ to manage her work. After talking about it a bit to various artists, they found that there was actually a lot of interest in something like this. Basically, there were a lot of artists that wanted to be taking commissions, but had trouble keeping track of everything and even ended up losing orders and contact information. Now, every other profession has a ton of software designed to support professionals and keep track of things for them, so why not commission artists?

They decided that there should really be a website where artists and commissioners can find each-other. A community devoted to promoting commission art as a profession. Somewhere that art is valued in a manner similar to any other profession, allowing artists to make a living wage. From that goal, CommissionMe.net and the CM Project was born.

The CM Project is a collaborative effort between artists, commissioners, and anyone else in the community to create a better gallery. We know what we like in galleries and management systems, but we want to know what everyone else wants. The goal is to build CommissionMe from the ground up on user input, and that is why we’ve opened these forums at the extremely early alpha versions of CM.

So what we really want to do here is make a new gallery site. But we also want to make a commission marketplace. And we want to be able to bring artists and commissioners together. When an artist sits down to start working for the day, we have a vision of them opening up their CM dashboard, picking the project they want to work on, and going at it. Once they’re done, they will be able to provide their customer with an update (if they wish). At completion of a project, they will be able to provide the customer with the finished work, and mark it as completed in their queue. 

By using CM, all communications can be facilitated in one location providing a permanent archive of what was, and was not said. Additionally, artists will be able to provide a custom spreadsheet to their customers if they wish which will show their current workload and commission status. The goal here is to take all of the burden of management off of the artist, and automate it. So you can spend less time figuring out what to work on, and more time creating.

We want those looking for artists to be able to find artists that match their style, and be able to easily check their commission status and place an order with them. Hopefully through centralization of these services, the entire process can be made much more manageable and approachable for everyone.

Now we know that there will be challenges. We have never tackled a project of this magnitude before. However, our staff do have experience managing enterprise level web applications for thousands of concurrent users, and years of experience in administering these kinds of systems. There will be glitches and hiccups. But with time, money, and your help, we can finally bring together all of these disparate websites into one central location for artists and those who appreciate the arts.

So please, join all of us in building a better website. Make your voice heard. Tell us what features you want to see, what design choices you like and dislike, what management tools you need. Help us to make the best site possible, and bring commission artwork to a viable professional level.

Thanks so much for reading! We hope to hear from you on the forums!