Hi All,
Gosh I haven't posted hereabouts in a very long time(remember me from the Dust Devils cover, or Spione cover, or maybe even George's Children?).  Myself and my partners have just launched a new art on demand service, which struck me as of particular use to Forge members.  One reason being we as the artists keep our rights on what we are selling, maintaining the status of your publications as truly creator owned.  Secondly we offer our artwork at small press friendly prices, with licenses which hopefully suit your needs being for non exclusive single use.  Why pay for more than you need?

We have all kinds of fancy banners we're using, but we shall on this occasion (and of course all others!) respect the rules on posting images!

Here's the official press release:

Illodeli.com: Pick your Own

Illodeli.com is a new online store which offers publishers the chance to buy artwork for their publications and immediately download it at print resolution.

Illodeli.com features the work of industry illustrators Scotty Purdy, Andy Hepworth and Jon Hodgson.

We have a range of work from full colour covers right down to black and white spot art, all at great prices, and unavailable anywhere else.

Illodeli.com is launching in public beta mode, so currently our catalogue is a small selection of work, with plans for expansion on the immediate horizon. Regular updates are also in the pipeline, so check back often or sign up for our newsletter.

Our licenses are extremely simple. Each purchase allows the non-exclusive single use within one product. This is the barest baseline of use we could come up with, which allows us to give the cheapest possible price. Our filler and spot art is sold under a wider license which allows reuse within one product. Which seemed only fair!

Holy moley!

Good stuff here. I'm torn between wanting to tell the world about it and wanting to keep this fantastic stuff for myself. ;)

I can't recommend Jon, Andy and the Scott's highly enough!

I have already fingered an image from the deli for a forthcoming project by myself and Epidiah Ravachol. :-)

Thanks fellers!

All of us realised we had various pieces ranging from old practice works, studies, software experiments and so on, right through to recent finished works that we owned the rights to, sitting around doing nothing, with no place to really set it on to good effect.  And it made sense to fill that particular niche between clip art, which can be a bit too generic and lacking "the special" and full on bespoke work, which let's be honest can be really pricey when you're trying to illustrate a book on a personal budget.  So Illodeli was born!

Obviously we would much rather you told everyone about it Fred!  Hopefully there's a range of stuff there right now which could inspire games in itself, whilst also being completely affordable.  I was just looking at this one: http://www.illodeli.com/?page_id=3&category=7&product_id=69 thinking "hmmmmm..." 

Excellent idea, guys -- it fills a niche which is, in retrospect, blaring obvious and underserved.

However, looking through the site I'm somewhat unsure of how far the Single Use license goes.  You say:

"When you buy a piece of art that is not a spot or filler piece, you can use it once in a single publication, including reprints of that publication."

How about second editions/etc?  With the move towards web/PDF publishing, the line between a reprint/edition is blurry -- things are constantly evolving tiny amounts, and it's not clear when the license would expire.  Similarly, if i'm providing both an HTML and a PDF version of my book, can i use it on both?  And the print version?  Am i allowed to use it on a web page at all?

James

jag wrote:
Excellent idea, guys -- it fills a niche which is, in retrospect, blaring obvious and underserved.

However, looking through the site I'm somewhat unsure of how far the Single Use license goes.  You say:

"When you buy a piece of art that is not a spot or filler piece, you can use it once in a single publication, including reprints of that publication."

How about second editions/etc?  With the move towards web/PDF publishing, the line between a reprint/edition is blurry -- things are constantly evolving tiny amounts, and it's not clear when the license would expire.  Similarly, if i'm providing both an HTML and a PDF version of my book, can i use it on both?  And the print version?  Am i allowed to use it on a web page at all?

James

Jon,

That helped a lot.  I agree in principal with your stance, "We're all reasonable people so we can figure it out," which is a nice break from ridiculous contracts.  What you just wrote goes a long way to clarify what the license means -- i suggest putting up a version of that somewhere appropriate on the website, so that a casual visitor would have a better idea of the license.  That way, they'd be more comfortable buying a piece on the spot, or at least asking you more specific questions about their desired use.

I'm harping on this because, when i read "We're reasonable people" without a list of acceptable/not-acceptable cases, I got flashbacks to when we've had difficult conversations with contactors who, although very reasonable people that we like and respect, had a very different interpretation of some terms than we did.  No one was out to cheat anyone, and those cases have always worked out, but a common starting point would have been useful.

James

Jinkies!

Sticky'd.

Ha haa, such a great idea. An easy way for artists to turn a long tail profit, and for art to find customers. I especially love the no-nonsense pricing scheme, coming from a non-bargaining culture; just deal with the price or go elsewhere, without non-explicit bargains, "contact me for pricing" or other bullshit. I expect this to become a hit - better start thinking of storefront commissions for when artists start clamoring for a spot in your store!

A question, actually: how did you manage to coordinate the prices? I notice that most art in each individual category is priced very similarly with each other; did you agree on some hard category-based prices, or did things just work out this way on individual basis? In other words, did you agree to set price points to not undercut each other?

Thanks guys!

Jag - Thanks for all your input, its been most helpful and we're planning some blog entries about these issues right now!

Ron - Thank you very much! Most kind!

Eero - Simplicity is king for this project!  Because its very definitely an add-on or side to all of our contributors core businesses, we didn't want to get into finickety pricing details, or anything that would take up too much of our time which could be spent painting commissions.  We also wanted to make it easy for customers to get a feel for what kinds of prices we charge, and be able to fairly quickly assess what they can get for their money.  I know if I were a customer at Illodeli, if I had to do too much paperwork just to see what I had spent, on what, from what categories I probably wouldn't make it through the whole process.  And sure, we are operating very much form a "this is what we have, this is what it costs" stand point.

How we coordinated was to have a chat on our private forums, and we all pretty quickly agreed.  Since its all work that otherwise wouldn't be doing much it wasn't too difficult. We had no desire to undercut each other really I don't think - in general the guys behind this project have a high regard for mutualism.  We looked at clip art prices, we know our own commission prices and aimed somewhere in between, that felt right for both us and our customers. Hopefully we've got it about right.  I'm sure we'll learn as we grow too.

Thanks again all!

Hi Jon

What plugins do I need to be running to view the larger versions of the samples?

I'm suspicious that it's a plugin problem on my end.  However, for whatever reason, when I click on a thumbnail, I load a new page with no enlarged version.

I'm running IE 6.0 on Windows XP Pro v 5.1

Cheers,
Darcy

Hi Darcy - Sadly I can't answer that myself right now, but I shall check that out for you with our web boffins and pop back as soon as I know!

Hi Darcy,
OK, as I suspected (but wasn't entirely sure of) its just javascript that opens the thumbs.  So that would indicate a browser problem at your end if its not working.  An alternative is to right click the thumbnail images and select 'open in new window'.

Hey all! 

Something of vital importance has just recently come to my attention, and I felt it especially important to bring it here where this thread has been so kindly stickied.

Its vital that before you make purchases on Illodeli.com you make an account on our system.  We've been somewhat remiss in not making that more abundantly and absolutely clear.

We've made some changes to the front page, and some small ones to the back room gadgetry to make that more clear and more rigid, but I thought it was important to stress that.  Our system needs an account to connect you with your downloads. 

I've also just written up a new piece on the illodeli blog about the most exciting of topics - shopping carts!  If you're already signed up it might be worth checking it out!: http://www.illodeli.com/?p=131

In more regular news things we have been streamlining the service, adding new artwork and generally responding to feedback we've received.  Elsewhere we've been showing off some examples, but we're still managing to respect The Forge's no image policy, so you'll have to come and dig around the site for the eye candy!  We've had some very satisfied customers, some customers we've had to work a bit harder to hopefully make happy (thoruhg no fault of their own I must add!), and one incident of someone robbing us already! Ahh the internet, how you inspire and confound!  As I mention in the blog, we're battling on in our quest from public Beta to SHINING GOLDEN WIN.  Hopefully!

Cheers!

Hi All, and a happy new year!

I'll spare The Forge the ad-speak, and just let you all know we have massively expanded the Illodeli.com stock. We have new server space, updated FAQs, an updated blog, and some really great new things available. Even if I do say so myself!

The stock has expanded beyond fantasy fare into some other areas. Well worth a look.

It's also well worth signing up at the site to get our newsletter which gives details of when we make additions to the site.

www.illodeli.com

Thanks!

Just saw this site, absolutely awesome stuff. I may want some artwork for a website soon, and if I do I'll be buying it from you.

This is a fantastic idea!  Also, the server upgrades have helped a ton, the first time I tried going here, I couldn't actually load any pictures.

I also wanted to make a comment.  You should try and encourage artists to upload more interior artwork.  There is a bunch of covers but few pictures to go inside. In addition to this, I can't imagine using one of your covers on a book. Unfortunately, an RPG's cover is very much its identity and you don't want your RPG's identity confused with another product. Buying a one time license from an artist is not a terrible idea, because it's unlikely another P&P RPG will find that artist and want that exact picture as a cover. But with your service set up the way it is and targeting these games, I feel it could be very likely that more than one game would use the same cover. I personally feel it would be worth the money to find an artist to do my cover, even if I used your service for my game's interior artwork (which I could see doing.)

I'm so glad to see someone doing a service like this.

Great stuff.  Really, a winning idea.  I think it's especially appealing for the filler work.

A couple of my friends freelance for concept work.  Do you guys accept new artists?

Hi!
I'd firstly like to apologise for the enormous silence. I thought I was all hooked up with email notifications on every thread I had made about Illodeli. Clearly not.

Although extremely late to the party - the hosts have moved out, the building condemned and demolished and a new building has been built in the mean time -  I figure it's better late than never ever.

Thanks for the well wishes, the site continues to grow and draws ever closer to leaving beta. 

We are hopefully a little more full of interior art now, and I'm glad to hear David say he'd scrape up the money for bespoke cover art. Good! That's what pays my bills!  However we are having success with our covers, so they seem to be meeting someone's needs.

As to accepting new artists, not currently. We have a shortlist of contactees when we're ready, so it really truly is a case of "don't call us we'll call you."