deviantart

After 10 years of serving as a place for artists to collaborate and share their works, DeviantArt is now aiming to play a more central role in the creation process.

This week the Web site unveiled DeviantArt Muro, a free, HTML5-based drawing program. The program contains a variety of tools and brushes and also supports pressure-sensitive tablets, such as those from Wacom.

A DeviantArt representative said that the idea for Muro had been kicking around for several years, while the actual creation of the tool was a months-long project.

Though not aiming to match Photoshop and other tools in breadth, … Read more

Yesterday social arts community and two time Webware 100 winner Deviant Art released a beautiful mobile version of its site that's been optimized for Apple's iPhone. I've been playing around with it this afternoon and it's a wonderfully simple way to explore the various art mediums that have made the community so popular. To access it, users simply need to navigate to DeviantArt.com on their handsets and they'll automatically be directed to the finger friendly version.

It shares a lot in common with Facebook's iPhone app, a design so successful that it's been featured in Apple's advertising for the device. However, unlike Facebook, DeviantArt's efforts rely more on a simple menu structure that lets you dig through its 1600 plus categories of art to explore only the bits that interest you. While simple and fairly fast to navigate (even over EDGE), once you get about four levels deep it gets a little cumbersome. Luckily, you're able to get to drill down to a specific category in about three menus. The real beauty is that you can hop back and forth between what's popular and what's new in any category you're in, and clicking on any item will open it up without taking you to a new page.

In addition to images and text items, DeviantArt has made available the entirety of its video collection. The videos can be played in full screen, and if you're logged in to your DeviantArt account you can bookmark them for later use. The same goes for any other content you come across. You're also able to visit user profiles like you would on the site, and browse through entire user galleries with just a few finger touches.

Coming in the future will be iPhone optimized versions of DeviantArts forums, news pages, and the the message center, which alerts users to new content submitted by users they've bookmarked. More shots after the break.

… Read more

DeviantArt is a service that hosts user-created art, be it a photograph, written word, or digital creations. The service has been around since 2000, and currently hosts more than 54 million pieces of user-generated art. Art creators can post their works for others to see and interact with. Users can comment on any piece of art, sharing it on their blog or Web site, and purchasing it in the integrated store. It's one-part portfolio, and one-part social network, as the more popular artists on the service garner their own fan base and income off art sales.

In addition to … Read more

DeviantArt gets 1.5 billion page views a month, making it one of the most popular Web sites that many people have never even heard of.

Despite the name, only a fraction of the art on the site is what might be labeled deviant. In reality, the site boasts millions of user-uploaded works of art, everything from photography to 3D digital conceptual art to old-fashioned canvas-and-paint portraits.

Think of it as a YouTube for artists trying to show their own work. Pieces can be viewed, commented on, even added to a user's own gallery of favorites. The range of … Read more