Social networks aren’t just great for connecting people with their friends and family. They’re great ways to find content. Myspace has been a great platform for connecting bands with their fans and fans with musicians. The power of social networks is being harnessed to help artists and designers come together in new ways. Community is one of the major features of a social network. People go to where the people they want to contact are. So if you want to meet designers, these niche sites might just be great tools for it.

If you’ve used any of these sites or know of any that I didn’t mention, please post your comments!

Design Float

Not unlike the more generalized social rating site Digg, Design Float aims to help the design community share websites of interest with each other. It’s especially useful if you’re looking for specific topics such as photography. Digg has a more generalized audience.

The Outer Post

The Outer Post is a nice and friendly site where you can create art portfolios featured in your profile. In most other ways its like a lot of other social networking sites. The community is uniquely artists and that changes the landscape of how you can really use the thing.

VIRB

VIRB takes your interests and turns them into a more visual experience. The keyword and list oriented profiles of myspace and facebook are contrasted by VIRB’s focus on sharing your generated content. So basically, you post up your photos, link up your blog, post your videos. There is a ton of art, design and photography featured to look at. The best thing about it for me is that it aggregates your rss feeds into your profile if you don’t want to have to do everything a million times like on other sites.

DeviantArt

DeviantArt has been around for a while. The community is large and the site is fully featured. It’s a great place to just look at art and what people are doing. There’s just so many people posting there that you can see tons of stuff. The site puts the artwork in the forefront. The profiles really showcase the art and you can just look at someones profile or go to the art with very few clicks. Some of the other sites take a bit more work to actually see a full sized image: clicking through to searchs, profiles, albums and then finally artwork. While the size of the community can make for problems of its own, I think its still a leader in this space.

Graphic Design Network

The name might imply it or maybe not, but this site has a strict focus on building a community of designers and web developers. It’s based on the Ning social network development platform and is built its user base around the existing Estitica Design Forum community.

Amateur Illustrator

Amateur Illustrator takes a the simple and effective approach of putting up art galleries and forums letting you immediately access great content. Like Digg, they’ve moved away from the importance of the profile. You can still see the artist’s information and look at their forum posts and galleries. They let the art speak for the artist. It makes sense.

Sabet TV

Sabet, “a community of hyper-talented folks”, gives a feed approach similar to Facebook showing users recent activity and a flash slideshow of works. They also have videos and galleries. There is a lot of content types here meshed together

Pixel Art

Hey why not. It’s a community of pixel artists. It’s funny that now any type of community platform is now considered social networking. It’s strange how terminology suddenly defines something. The best of these new “social networks” are the ones who are less concerned with what they are and more keyed into what they’re trying to do. This site does just that. They love pixel art and want to bring together its creators. They showcase the sites best content and make it interesting even to people who didn’t know this stuff is cool.

Urbanseeder

While it’s in beta right now, it’s worth a mention. Urbanseeder is truly social networking. It allows you to connect with people you’ve met in a sandboxed environment. It’s a pretty creative concept, you’ll have to look at it and

myartspace

What makes this site interesting is that it connects artists with curators, collectors and others involved in the arts. They also have a blog of interviews with artists on various levels.

Artlog

Artlog aggregates art news, an event and exhibit log, news, museum information and a social layer into what turns out to be a promising product. The focus on the real world of art brings it above the self-love of user-generated profiles. Although they have those too, of course

Digg.com/Design

Users like yourself can rate stories using Digg’s interface. The ones which are rated highest end up more visible. It’s a simple concept integrated with social features such as profiles and comments. The ease of participation makes it a pretty good place to start.

mental_floss’ Taking Pictures of Strangers makes me wish I could have the courage to take a picture of someone I didn’t know without them knowing. I love people watching. Whenever I’m with someone, I love to point out someone who caught my attention. Oh come on, you do it too. Point out the person with the funny hair or wierd pants. My dream art show for a while has been to capture that kind of candid moment in paintings. I’ve secretly been hoping to paint it for a while, but not much has materialized. Nothing is more fascinating to me. But I’ve wanted to take reference photos and capture the actual moments first. I’m too afraid that they’ll look back. If I read that from someone else, I’d tell them “Oh get over it and just do it.”

Hopefully you’ve been checking out the SketcheeBook podcast, but if not please do. I’m hoping to have people submit questions, answers, comments, disagreements and tips to share with the audience. The audience is growing at a suprisingly steady rate. If you haven’t checked out the show, it is about keeping productive with your creative stuffs. Especially for busy and dedicated people. All kinds of different tips for illustrators, designers, hobbyists, etc.

I’ve been pretty busy myself doing the whole graphic design thing six days a week. The goal is to have a new section sketchee.com with my design portfolio and change up the setup for the illustration and painting portfolio a little bit with the highlights. Yeah, this site has a lot of work to get it to where it needs to be. But that’s is the dynamic nature of the web, I try to keep it at least presentable.

My latest posts have been from Nakama.ca, which seems to have gone down. My guess is that they got too popular for the kind of server loads that they have to handle. But it’s suprising when the site has just vanished so abruptly.

Bug painting progress

Posted straight from my phone with Nakama.

Little sketch of kids playing chess

This weeks Illustration Friday:

Click for the bigger version!

The WIPS

Also check out the newest featured blog in the sidebar, The Naked Eye.

And lastly, also check check out 22 Panels the Always Work. Haha I think I’ll make 22 paintings of the 22 different types of panels. That would be funny

Illustration Friday… My idea was just lots of layers of clothing. Having her with the hanging and kind of changing to show that the focus is the clothes? I dunno if it makes sense.

THe underpainting compared to last weeks is so underdeveloped compared to last weeks’. Now I’m running into problems that I should have worked out in the monochromatic. The shoulders and face are wide, the arms don’t feel right. The last couple paintings took only a few hours. It’s a lot easier to quickly fix those things in the monochromatic and now it might take extra time… Let’s see if it all works out

I am working on some non IF stuff but I’m keeping it on the hush hush until it’s done.

For this week’s Illustration Friday:

I knew kinda what I wanted for this theme (Play). I searched da for handcuffs because I didn’t want to be my own model again this week… Thanks to halo19 for bailing me out

And I guess it’s a playful color scheme if you think about it

I haven’t put up any new art and sketches in a while. I may put up some designs from work or something so I can pretend like I’m still doing something creative. In the meantime, I took pictures of myself. This is like the only one I can show here.

Anyway, design work is plentiful as usual. No commissions lately. I need to start getting my work into shows but that means making the paintings.