Quarterly Rant on Conceptships

I know it's not the most popular segment here but I like to communicate things to the few readers that are possibly interested in my rants.

Let's start with the obvious Disney buys Lucasfilm for 4 billy goats story. Very interesting news there, I really hope Disney stays true to Lucas' vision and perhaps even improves on it. We shall see with Episode VII. What do you guys think of Disney's new investment?

A little side story. I attended a 16 month graphic design course at Platt College in 1990-1991 here in Denver (before it was an accredited institution)and our teacher gave me the nickname "Walt". It was sort of embarrassing to me at the time because there were so many skilled students in our class and that is all she would ever call me. I ran into her later, after "graduation" and she told me that it was my ideas and concepts that earned me that nickname as opposed to my typesetting or rendering skills. I always thought that was rather interesting and looking back at it now, it is very satisfying. Thanks Janet!

So, a lot of concept art websites and Facebook pages have been popping up lately. When I originally had the idea for Conceptships back in 2007, there was hardly anyone doing that sort of thing other than the big boys like CA.org, CGSociety, FFFFound and maybe a few others. I actually got the idea from a place called CGUnit and Scott Robertson's Design Studio Press forum. I had a feeling that more sites were going to pop up. After all, it is not very hard to repost someone else's art work, especially when I and others already had a fairly large database of concept artists and works. I thought that categorizing works by genre could be a big benefit to artists and that would also be a way to differentiate myself form all of the other would be pop-ups. I also needed something else to set myself apart and that is where the idea of the Monthly Header (then the Weekly Header) came about.

You may have noticed that I tried an experiment last month where (for the first time in years) there was a stagnant header image as opposed to the usual animated Flash loop one. It was a test to see how that would affect my page view count, bounce rate, time each user spent on the site and (obviously) ad revenue differences. You guys may not believe this but the only thing that has happened is that the ad revenue DIPPED slightly. Isn't that amazing? Page views did go up a little and bounce rates did decrease just a fraction but the test proved that the Headers are a good visual break in my layout. Somewhere along the way they will have to be converted to HTML5 but for now. They are back!

New Header coming for November. Stay tuned and THANKS SO MUCH FOR EVERYONE'S SUPPORT!!!