In light of the recent management change for the website, we’ve decided to take a step back in some respects and instead focus on the original mission of the website. Our Mission Statement, itself, states that we wish to provide services to aid in and expand upon and help out with the hard work our artists and writers and photographers and just about everybody in between put into their creations. We stated that we wanted to create tools to empower and improve upon the status quo, and now that opportunity is here for us to do so.

Identity is an incredibly large part of the furry community. We, as a whole, are very uniquely driven by our own personas and characters, and these often represent a part or all of us. As stated in our mission statement, Creative Media in all forms is a gateway for all of us to explore and understand ourselves through our persona, and we feel this must be supported entirely.

With that said, visibility and accessibility has always been a concern within the community as a whole. We have seen it mentioned, time and again, that commissioners who wish to bring their inner selves to life struggle to find that perfect artist to help them bring their creation out into the world.. On the flipside, we’ve seen many willing artists, who all wish to help the community and bring characters to life, struggle to find and acquire commissioners who might be looking for work at this very moment. This is, in essence, a very undesirable situation.

We aim to resolve this with some great tools, designed to bring the community closer and make the commission process more streamlined. We want our commissioners and our artists to find each other, so that we can all become closer as a community and share our skills and talents with each other, and bring all our creations to life.

The Commission Marketplace

Our latest update to the website features expanded Commission Marketplace tools, as well as expanded features for all artists who wish to offer commissions to the community. We have released this product now as its simplest essence – a market where artists can highlight their work, and where commissioners can engage them. But we don’t plan to stop there – with the feedback we receive from the community in a dedicated support area, we will build better experiences for artists and commissioners. Think of this as helping us build a park in the way that you feel benefits the community as a whole.

That said, this is still an entirely new product that we’re offering, and an entirely new venture on the site. The current state of the system may be simple, but look at this as sort of a blank canvas to build upon and build out. We worked hard to get our tools to a great place to start this effort, so much so that any artist and consumer can opt in and complete purchases on their own, from start to end. This is, after all, a major goal we wish to achieve. Our initial test will involve working with a small group of artists, specifically, to make sure the system is simple and usable before we open it up to more users. We will be expanding on this actively, once we ensure we smooth on the onboarding and transition period. This launch will come over time, but we want to get this into the hands of everybody as soon as reasonably possible!

Every artist will have access to an easily configurable tool that will allow them to “open” and “close” commissions, based on their availability. Customers can opt in to notifications as well, so that they will be emailed each time a product is made available. Each “product category” will link customers to a new page, so that all examples of the product offering can be viewed by the customer, so that they know what to expect. All of these example images can be populated from your gallery, there’s no additional need to upload more than what you already have.

The “request” screen currently supports the direct upload of references, so that artists and commissioners do not need to fumble around with links and worry about having to search around for them. They are all in one place! Future plans have us expanding out this system. All communication is handled through the internal system of communications we have, which includes the ability to share WIP pictures directly and swap updates quickly and efficiently, so that every part of the commission process is in one place.

All payments will be handled by our own internal payment processor, CCBill. As such, all arbitration and payment disputes will be handled by us directly, in order to better meet the needs of our clients that currently utilize payment services that might have more restrictive policies. During testing, all processing fees associated with this will be free, while we work to get all features online and accessible. The final fee for utilizing our services will be determined before the full, final launch of the system, but we we expect it to be competitive with services you already use.

We sincerely believe we can work together, both FN staff, Development team and the Community, to build on our foundation we’ve put together here and create the Community Center we all wish it to be! Please feel free to head to our support system and let us know any questions you might have, or head over to the support forum and make a few thread suggestions and vote on the features we’ve got listed already 🙂

Thank you again for all being apart of our community! We look forward to working with you all!