“ like having to learn a new platform altogether! A lot of the people who use DeviantArt are attached to the way it used to be, so I think they’ll need to attract a lot of new members in order for this huge change to catch on.”ĭeviantArt’s design is something the company has debated internally for a long time. Baarle describes her experience with Eclipse as “overwhelming” so far. She’s more active these days on Instagram or Twitter, but still updates her DeviantArt occasionally. Illustrator Lois van Baarle has been a DeviantArt member since 2002 and is one of the site’s most recognized artists. But none of the redesigns have been as drastic as this. Sotira doesn’t seem worried, having come to expect this sort of reaction throughout the 10 versions the site has gone through in 19 years. It’s also been criticized as being too similar to ArtStation, another creative platform for sharing art. Many longtime users aren’t happy about missing features nor the buggy new interface that’s still going through growing pains others welcome it as progress, recognizing that it’s time to move away from the dated design.
Eclipse is also getting rid of third-party ads, which used to be a perk that Core members (a $5/month subscription feature that also gets users more storage and site features) paid for.Ĭommunity reaction to the redesign appears to be split. There are redesigned pages for deviations (what DeviantArt calls submissions) that let you choose your background to make art stand out, and expanded search functionalities that let users browse commissions, polls, and tags. User profiles are more customizable with rearrangeable Wix widgets and huge header photos. Platform fatigue is setting in, and artists are looking for other options.Įclipse is rolling out to users now, and the aesthetic is decidedly more modern, available in a light or dark theme. Recently, competing sites have been struck with their own set of problems: much of Tumblr’s oddball community fled the site after a crackdown on adult content, and Instagram’s algorithms have made it harder for artists to be discovered unless they post content regularly. Now DeviantArt is hoping to reclaim its place as the creative social platform for artists - and it might be the perfect time. Just three years later, it would fall to 45 million, and the platform hasn’t updated the stat since. In 2012, DeviantArt advertised having 65 million monthly visitors. Artists traded the niche, art-focused community for broader networks that were easier to use and could reach more people, and visits to DeviantArt began to plummet.
A DeviantArt Eclipse profile page.īut as social networks began taking off, users gradually started to leave for bigger platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. “Online art communities are probably a huge reason that you’re seeing a lot more girls getting into animation and illustration,” Shi told The New York Times in an interview.
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Professional artists - like the Oscar-winning director of Pixar’s Bao, Domee Shi - credit the site as the place where they got their start. Users could leave constructive criticism under people’s art and write messages on each others’ profiles, long before Facebook was invented. In its heyday, DeviantArt was home to a tight-knit community for artists of all skills. “The aim is to be DeviantArt for the next 10 years, not the past 20,” Sotira says. Now, after its acquisition by the website-building platform Wix in 2017, the site’s perennial army-green design is being revamped with a sleek new layout called DeviantArt Eclipse. But CEO Angelo Sotira, who co-founded the site when he was 19, maintains that the platform is very young, at least when you look at the age of its users and how long they’ve been making art. To paint a picture of the era it was born in, the online creative community was originally started in 2000 to share skins for media players like Winamp. In social network years, DeviantArt is ancient.
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