About Pixish
Pixish is a place where people who want images and people who make images can easily find each other and collaborate on creative projects together.
There's so much talent online — we want to get your work out there!
The problem we're trying to solve:
Say you're a magazine. You have a story that you need an illustration for. Your options are to find an artist for a custom job (time-consuming and expensive) or spend all day trolling microstock sites to find the perfect image (cheap, but just as time-consuming, and very frustrating).
Pixish is a middle path. With Pixish, you can create an Assignment that asks for what you want. Pixish peeps can submit their work and collaboratively vote the best up. All you have to do is pick the winning entry!
Why would publishers do this? Because it's a fun way to invite their community to participate, because they get great work from new artists, and because it's cheaper than hiring a pro outright.
Why would artists do this? Because it's a great way to get your work out into the world, win some rewards, get paid, make a name for yourself, and collaborate with your fellow artists.
But isn't this spec work? We acknowledge that some artists are against working before there's a contract in place, so they may not want to participate here. And that's fine - Pixish isn't for everyone. If you're already making a living as a pro, hooray! We're thrilled for you. But you're lucky. There are a lot of really talented folks who aren't. We want to give them a chance to get out there, get published, and get paid.
What kind of Assignments can I make? Anything you need images for! An author could ask for book cover photos. A website could solicit illustrators to create a mascot. A Chihuahua-lover could invite people to submit photos for a dog book. A curator could do a crowd-powered group show. And more! We can't wait to see what you make.
What if I make an Assignment and no one participates? Consider adding more rewards or cash.
What if I make an Assignment get too many submissions? That's where the community vote comes in. Pixish members can vote on all the submissions in an assignment. They're really good at bring the best submissions up to the top.
What's with the name? We wanted something that combined "pictures" and "publish" ... hence, Pixish. And huge thanks to Brendan McGuigan for giving us the domain.
Who's behind this? Pixish was founded by....
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Derek Powazek
Chief Idea Guy and “Wouldn't it be cool if…” Officer
Cat Spoo, Dogs Bug and Chieka
San Francisco, California, USA
Derek has worked on the web since there was one. He cut his teeth at Web 0.1 companies like HotWired and Electric Minds, but didn’t learn. Since then he’s survived a dozen startups, including a couple of his own. Some of his claims to fame include designing the Blogger B, the Technorati branding, and writing “Design for Community” right before the bubble burst. He’s now a social media consultant, advising several startups, the editor and publisher of the community-driven quarterly Fray, and CEO of Pixish. powazek.com -
Jason Perkins
Chief Tech Guy and “Sweating the details” Officer
Fish of Unknown Names
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Jason has ten years’ experience working the web. He’s written articles for Sitepoint and O’Reilly, tech edited the fourth edition of “Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML” and launched dozens of websites. He’s also a dad and a motorcycle enthusiast. sneer.org -
Dan Hodos
Chief Code Guy and “Yeah, we can do that” Officer
Cat Charlotte
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Dan has been single-handedly solving world-wide problems since high school, if you replace the words “single-handedly solving” with “coding on the” and “problems” with “web.” He's a big proponent of Agile Software Development, Ruby on Rails, and web standards. danhodos.com -
James Goode
Chief Design Guy and “Bringing it all together” Officer
Cats Camino and Stanislavski
Sydney, New South Wales, AUS
James is talented designer and writer who approaches the web with excitement and optimism. His cats totally do not understand why he spends so much time with that laptop. sodapopandco.com
I have more questions! Cool. Drop us a line!
