Our Stock Community here at deviantART is really neat, and it has been here with us since the very early days of deviantART. Artists need "photo stock" in order to create photo manipulations, sketches, digital art, and a variety of other things. Many of our members have contributed throughout the years to our free stock galleries, which have highly restricted uses but have permitted an open sharing of useful stock imagery for our communities’ purpose.

I’ve been following closely the extensive conversations over at #HQ about stock on deviantART.  I’m excited to say that we are going to put together an organized stock offering on deviantART, and the first step is the creation of the #StockProject Group, so you guys can follow along on what we're planning here.  And, at the same time, we are announcing a partnership with an industry-leading microstock company, who you (may) know as Fotolia.

There is an incredible combined intelligence about the stock business right here. As I mentioned, many of you use stock, make commercial stock, or make free stock available to the community; sometimes you do all three.  We need to focus that intelligence to birth the ideal resource for this core activity for our community, and that’s precisely what #StockProject is for.

The discussions at #HQ already point to some of the things we should make: special deviant collections that become a go-to environment for art directors and illustrators looking to break out from the standard stuff (this really exposes your work to the marketplace and has a huge potential for deviants); better artist splits when stock gets licensed; great pricing for deviants, particularly when you use stock for developing your talent and not for commercial projects; building more advanced search that raises the bar for accessing stock; simple-to-read licenses that really let you know what you can and can’t do; and delivering soup-to-nuts resources -- not just visually, but that work culturally for a worldwide membership.

We also need contributions to the process from an experienced commercial partner that understands the stock business. Fotolia’s management knows commercial stock. They built their business from scratch, an accomplishment we here at deviantART recognize and respect. They are an independent company and are independently minded, which means they are paying attention to their users and not to the boardroom. They’ve figured out internationalism better than any of the other stock providers. They understand what we need to accomplish, support it, and even want to build it with us as a laboratory for their own business.  But their best quality is a willingness to experiment on how to properly handle stock for an art community like us.

As a first step, Fotolia is making its business available to deviants. This is only a first step, but right now, you can go to The deviantART Stock Project with Fotolia, where you can start to see the types of resources we can now offer.  We also have some of their free images available at #StockProject, which is just a first gesture of the type of additional support our stock community will now be seeing. We’ve also put together another HQ blog explaining the partnership and launch of this new group and the focus behind it.

The real work will be building our own stock offering. Over the next weeks, we are going to spec-out what an ideal stock integration would look like on deviantART. So from here on, I’ll be over at #StockProject talking about this. Feel free to leave comments and ideas there.