Questions about YayArt's competitions

YayArt is about providing a common ground for digital artists and people who'd like to find something different for their walls. We're dedicated to our community of artists and people who enjoy images with personality, and to bringing the best works out into people's homes.

We're an easy way for a digital graphic artist to get promoted and earn some bucks. If you're an artist, all you have to do is to create a profile and submit your work. We take care of the rest!

If people like your work, your art will end up in the homes of people who might never otherwise engage in art, and you'll get cash in return.

YayArt is an easy art experience. You can enjoy the images, maybe learn something about the world and yourself, put your fingerprint on what we think is good art and what's not, get closer to the artists, find something new and thought-provoking to put on your walls.

YayArt is created by five young programmers and designers, having trouble finding cool stuff for their walls. We do most things ourselves, and love a good challenge.

We're located in beautiful Denmark, and try to maintain a global view on things. You can find more about us on iola.dk and fa-mo.com.

Digital screens, while having improved a lot over the last decade, are still no match for a high-quality print with respect to colors, viewing angle and general appearance.

Plus YayArt is easy! Digital screens are expensive and cumbersome to put up with cables and what have you.

There are several possibilities:
- subscribe to our news letter
- visit the talk page to see what's going on at the site right now
- follow our blog which we usually update frequently
- subscribe to our RSS feeds with a news reader (vote news, shop news, blog news)

First and foremost we want a Yay-community, this means:

- Think before you post
- Always keep the language civil to avoid flame wars
- Constructive feedback is good, destructive feedback is not
- No spam

In general if you apply common sense then you should be fine :)

We hold competitions continuously where everyone can submit. Read about the latest competition theme and our exhibitions in the blog.

The masses! Everybody is welcome to voice their point of view. The audience is the world, who's sitting out there we don't know, nurses, carpenters, nerds, students, you? Give it a try, see what people think.

Capture peoples attention, move them, do what it takes - create a work of art. Our community will decide your art work's fate by voting.

You look for what you think is art. We like to judge the art in 3 steps.

1. Instant love. How does it make you feel?

2. Can you keep looking at the piece, without getting tired of it?

3. Would you like to hang it on your walls?

We have just five rules..

Rule 1: Art represents effort, and sometimes even soul - we expect the same
Rule 2: The art piece must have been processed digitally in a creative and significant way
Rule 3: You are not allowed to submit multiple versions of the same basic artwork
Rule 4: If you want to include advertising elements, make sure to do so artistically
Rule 5: Your art work must be submitted in 960x960 or 3543x3543 pixels

For instance...
- A quick standard vector trace of a photo is often fun, but not always art
- A photography of a pretty sunset is not in itself appropriate. You must have done some substantial processing of it on a computer
- A snapshot of a piece you've already painted on paper or canvas isn’t what we’re looking for, unless you make creative and significant digital work on it afterwards
- We know it’s hard, but you need to decide what version of your piece to world should see
- Don’t submit a logo by itself, use it artistically
- Stay with the format, we know it limits the artistic freedom, but think of it as a challenge :)

In technical terms, we accept PNG, JPEG and TIFF with LZW compression. With JPEG and TIFF you can use CMYK colors and save the used color profile in the file. When you submit an image, a preview should show up with an indication of how a print would look like.

Remember that eventually we want your image to show up on print. The production ready image

... is in 3543x3543
... has a signature in the bottom right corner (according to the signing guidelines)
... avoids placing vital things (including the signature) in the 60 outermost pixels along the edges as it may be cropped
... does not have a thin odd-colored border (which inadvertently looks silly in print)
... is careful that large gradients don't show signs of banding

If your artwork wins, you will have to include an signature on your art piece. This should be placed in the bottom right corner, with at least 60 pixels of space to each edge.

The signature should contain your real name, or your artist name, and nothing else. No website addresses or trademarks.

Check that the image has the necessary resolution. Note that the DPI setting doesn't matter, you can set it to whatever you want - you just need to comply with the pixel count.

Also check that you're uploading in a valid format. We currently support JPEG (in RGB or CMYK), TIFF images with LZW compression (in RGB or in CMYK) and PNG.

Check that there isn't a transparency/alpha channel in the image. We don't support transparency due to the opaque nature of paper.

Note that we only accept perfect squares. If your image is rectangular, crop it before you submit. Otherwise our image robot will crop it for your, but it's a machine so naturally it's a bit dumb.

Wrong colors: we put the images through a conversion process to simulate how the image will look like in print. If the colors look washed out it might be because they cannot be represented accurately in CMYK. We recommend you try working with your image in CMYK to see whether it's a problem.

You should first check the submission page for a summary (in the side bar to the right). You can find the general YayArt terms for art submission here.

Sure! Everyone can participate. If it's serious and you have put effort into it then give it a try. The YayArt audience will be your judge. Head over to the submit page and get started right away!

Short answer: because it's easy! We provide hosting, pimp your work for you, take care of printing, payments, support, everything.

First and foremost YayArt is a common ground for digital graphic art with a wide audience. There's a positive network effect in having art from many artists. Basically, when another artist draws attention to YayArt because of a work, some of the extra visitors will see your art too.

We have several facilities in store to help you promote your work and get more people to rate and comment on your pieces.

- Be an active member of the community. Other people also like to feel the Yay-love :)
- Use your profile as the link you share with your friends to get them to vote for or buy your art.
- Add your external blog to our YayBlogs.
- Use the Facebook connect functionality to share your art taste with your friends on Facebook.
- Use your Yay and Art banner (it's under Edit profile) to share your art and art taste with friends of your blog or in forums that you use.