Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Blinded By The White...A Little Follow Up


I decided to work with this a little more instead of doing my housework like a good girl.  I took into account your comments, and I think I figured out why most of us don't like the stark white background.  It's because there is very little depth or dimension to the image.  There is nothing to draw us into the photo and the world of that bear.  It's just there on top of a blank page so to speak.  My Little Prince was such a willing subject.  Bears are patient that way!

Most of us like to picture how that piece would fit into our lives, our homes or if it's a jewelry piece or something...on our body.  When it's floating on a white background it makes it hard to imagine that.  As artists we like to be visually stimulated and have something that tells a story. I believe that most of our customers have that same mind set.  I could be wrong.

I decided to try the "white room effect" like they do in many decorating magazines.  Most of us wouldn't actually like to live in a pure white house because we are real people who don't stay hermetically clean.  Especially if you make bears.  But there is a certain ideal to that.  I actually like the photo shown above, because it does have depth and a little context.  However the background is too busy to ever satisfy Etsy's current minimalist ethos.

I haven't entirely decided if I want to re-photograph everything in this setting or not.  I will wait for your feedback before I decide.  So there are my conclusions to this little experiment.

I also feel that it's important for Etsy to figure out with so many varieties of art that we must learn and cater to our target audience first and foremost, and consider fads as a mere afterthought.   They can dictate what they want, but if they homogenize the front page in this way they are turning off a large part of their audience, like myself who is never going to be inspired to buy something floating in thin air.  That's a lesson they need to learn.

Thank you all for taking time to comment and give me your thoughts on this.  It was a learning experience...and that is always valuable!

3 comments:

Heather said...

I know this is a totally random aside, and might suck as an end result, but I'd kind of like to see the pedestal pulled a little bit away from the background, so the background is almost slightly out of focus, and you have the bear in the foreground on the pedestal as the very in focus part.

You were just talking about etsy minimalist background and the blankness of the white, and it just made me think that might be a nice setup, where it's still mostly white, and yet the background has texture to it.

... then again, I could be totally wrong. LOL!

Kelly said...

I would have liked that too Heather, but the wooden box isn't that deep! lol

Heather said...

I didn't even realize he was in a wooden box 0_0

LOL! I just thought it was a flat background, doh!

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