One of the Behance Network's most important features is each person's "inner circle." Your inner circle is a collection of your colleagues and people you know and/or respect.
Every time you publish a new project or join a new group, your inner circle is notified. This becomes a powerful way to get feedback and disseminate your latest work.
BUT, WE CAN RUN INTO A FEW PROBLEMS WITH INNER CIRCLES:
(1) If you join the inner circle for people you don't know, then you will get lots of notifications that you don't care about. Messages from your inner circle will start to look like "spam" unless you curate your inner circle CAREFULLY. Inner circles were designed to be small and important...
(2) If you like someone's work, just ADD THEM TO YOUR WATCHLIST (in "Tools" within each project). At Behance, we refuse over 90% of inner circle invitations. But we have huge watchlists of members we love to watch...
(3) If you send too many messages to your inner circle, they may leave you! We encourage you to use your inner circle wisely (just like you would use your close network of peers in the real world).
INNER CIRCLE MAINTENANCE
Want to better manage your inner circle? Maybe you should CLEAN IT UP! Here is how you review, remove people, and edit your inner circle:
(1) Go to "Circles" and select "My Circles." Then select the Top Circle in "My Circles" - your Inner Circle.
(2) Select "Edit Circle"
(3) Select "Participants." Click "remove" next to anyone that you wish to remove from your inner circle (don't worry, they won't get a message). You can also use this space to add any members that you know well or truly respect.
We came across a little story in Behance Network member Adriana de Barros' visual journal today. She explains that she has been meeting many new artists in the network and received an invite from painter Simon M. Smith for input on a special project:
"This is something I’ve never done before: seek ideas, input, intervention in one of my paintings. If anyone out there is interested in taking my existing image and interfering with it in some way, and then conveying the results back to me, I’d be very pleased to hear from them. (…) I’m particularly interested in what those of you working outside the realm of painting might make of it."
What follows is Adriana's fascinating journey to interpret his work through an entirely different artistic medium and vision. We encourage you to check out her story at "Interpreting the Abstract."
Also, the original painting work, as well as Adriana's interpretation, is posted in Simon's portfolio as a project title "Collaborative Invitation."
(co) Simon M. Smith
The Behance Network homepage is now "Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!", as the W3C would say. If you are a developer you might want to check out the HTML Validator yourself. Even if you think "Bah, that's far too technical for me" it can help you spot random HTML typos, as it did for me.
So here are some of the many changes and tweaks to the network this week:
GigList to JobList
We figured it was about time we changed the wording from "Gig" to "Job" to make things clearer for you and the people wanting to hire you. In case you have yet to check out the page, there's a good listing of creative jobs there.
Full Screen Video
It was long overdue, but now user's can click an icon under each video to see things full screen. This should make our HD videographers extra happy.
Re-ordering Re-done
The reordering system for your inner circle and projects has been redone. This makes it compatible with more browsers, including Safari 3.
Don't Forget About Us
Circles now have the "Us" tab defaulted to on instead of the "Our Projects" tab.
A few more thoughts from the annual TED Conference.
One great quote overheard from the designer of the Jawbone bluetooth headset and the OLPC $100 laptop (and he gave the quote as something he had heard before): "Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal..."
Also, here's an Action Book spotted in the main hall at TED (courtesy of our friend Josh Spear's phone camera):
I (Behance team member Scott) am at TED for a few days this week (at the outpost in Aspen, CO). Some fascinating concepts, ideas, and observations are coming up at the conference (and, we hope the limited edition TED Action Books in use by the 600+ TED University participants are helping capture the ideas!).
A few interesting tid-bits worthy of a posting:
(1) Esteemed designer Isaac Mizrahi shares insight on his creative process: "A lot of my design ideas come from mistakes or tricks of the eye." This was no surprise to hear, given what the Behance team has observed in effective brainstorming...
(2) A fascinating "map" of the world was displayed, depicting the size of countries based on the news coverage they get. It was amazing to see, for 2007, the fact that newsflow would insist that the world is all about US and Iraq. And, if you look deeper, you learn that pop-star drama gets more mindset than war, famine, and the like. The map was a visual wake-up call...and I'll look for an image to share with you!
A quick computer photo capture of the room:
I haven't posted in quite a while it would seem. Last night we relaunched Behance.com. We had outgrown the site quite a bit seeing as the front page was our magazine when there is a lot more to Behance.
So we broke the site up to help people make the most out of Behance.
Behance
The site now showcases everything we do with a simple navigation. You can easily find out and get to all aspects of Behance.
Behance Magazine
Our online magazine now has its own at http://www.behancemag.com/. On top of the facelift, it now houses our Glossary of Productive Creativity. The new filtering design on the main page allows you to apply the "Most ..." and "Field" filters to only tips, interviews, and articles. The old site applied the filters to all articles at once only.
Creative's Outfitter
The Creative's Outfitter is now at http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/. The design is lightened up with less lines so things are clearer. You can still go straight to all our Action Method Products or our Sketchbooks and Notepads.
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We hope that these changes will make everyone's experience with Behance better. We look forward to hearing back from users on all the change.
It makes our day when we come across thoughtful industry thinkers, leaders, and bloggers that take the time to explore Behance, often offering a candid view on the strengths and opportunities for growth in our business.
In a blogosphere full of three sentence posts and quick video snippets, our team really appreciates coming across in-depth posts on some of the projects we are working on.
We came across two recent posts on Control Your Robot, a well outlined blog covering the intersection of design, technology and life. The site shares a really observant review of both the Action Method and the Behance Network (along with a few other portfolio sites). We enjoyed reading the postings along with some of the other articles on the site. One in particular, "Make My Logo Bigger...Enough Said," reminded us of one of the early favorites on the Behance Network, also on the theme of "making the logo bigger!"
We also wanted to thank Ed Cotton over at Influx Insights for taking the time to interview Behance. We especially appreciated the nature of the questions and enjoyed going a little deeper on our mission, the trends and needs we are seeing in the creative community, and some thoughts on where Behance is headed. Influx Insights is a truly influential blog in the advertising/media world, and we were honored to be interviewed.
Our friends over at YouTheDesigner.com are running a fun contest, sponsored along with iStockPhoto and U-Printing. Behance has agreed to help serve as a judge. We're also told that here will be multiple rounds in which artists will build on previous round wiinners' works. This community approach should be interesting to watch. Worth checking out!