Nine Inch Nails are the uber pioneers for the Creative Industries. Those guys do everything right and are testing out a lot of ways to monetize their creative output. Somehow they understand the new setting and don’t blame the fans, instead they offer plenty of their stuff for free. This interview over at digg dialog offers so much insight for everyone who wants to step out into the world to build his creative capital.

Some of Trent’s ideas summed up

Hopefully this is rephrased in the right way

• Find your target audience and picture yourself in the future. Depending on your career wish you have to make different decisions in regard to your personal development. Mainstream artists should probably go another way, for example sign at a major lable, than underground or rather niche artists who would probably do best with word of mouth advertising and self publishing within their niche.
• People are not willing to pay for digital products they can get for free. Trent mentioned some kind of Poll at NIN.com where only 18% of the people would pay a small price with the artists getting the full share. This just underlines that you have to sell more than simple digital goods. Something that has value, not some simple product that can be easily copied and found everywhere around the web.
• The creative industries are changing and the big companies don’t want to lose their money and power, they don’t understand the natural evolution the internet has started. Being at the crossroads right now just tells us that we have no clue where this whole creative industry is going to. Just one thing is for sure, it’ll be a fun ride.
• Share with your fans, give them insight and the possibilities to work with your stuff. Sounded like this is one of the best ways to deepen the relationship with your fanbase.
• Build a business model out of limited and special editions, concerts and merchandise. Calculate your expenses and what you want to earn, moreover set realistic goals if you want to monetize your creative output. Selling just one thing is dead, you have to diversify your income streams.
• Marketing stunts and viral marketing are great ways to kickstart a career, but be sure that you have something to follow up.

It’s been an amazing, very thoughtful interview that really offers loads of different insights on the musical niche of the Creative Industries.

Graffiti helps young people to express themselves, some of those guys seem to have developed deep philosophic thinking. There is definitely a lot truth in those words.

What the duck is value??
First of all we need to know what value is! Is value something that helps people out? Probably yes. Is value something you get for free? Mostly not. Will value help you to get more money? Probably yes. What does wikipedia say about value?

In ethics, value is a property of objects, including physical objects as well as abstract objects (e.g. actions), representing their degree of importance. Value(Ethics)

First of all you have to think about what is valuable to yourself, after figuring that out you can ask what’s important to people? How do you become important, or valuable to the masses?
First of all, you have to offer something they want! This one is a must and a given fact, that’s no secret though. The secret to stardom is exclusivity! Don’t let everybody be part of the party. Or at least pretend that you don’t! Don’t know what’s your creative capital yet? Here are 33 ways to build it.

What do people want?

People want something special, they don’t want to be one in the crowd. They want that perfect Man or Woman for their life, the perfect car, those expensive clothes and to be treated good everywhere they go. Simply put, they want to be celebrities. Most people will never achieve what they want, they have to stick to what they get and look up to others. It’s your goal to be one of those guys the man in the street wants to be. He does not want that boring life, he wants to do cool stuff and quit the office job! The Internet allowed a growth of elite party societies, online groups and limited member courses, all those play with the idea of exclusivity. Being part of something not everybody has access to.

The classic oldschool scenario of adding value is the club scene. By adding a bouncer to your club and only letting the sexy ladies pass you are not only making sure that there is someone in case bad guys make trouble. A bouncer more importantly takes care of everyone else who wants to get inside. What’s a club without a waiting line? One that’s about to close soon, that’s for sure!
Sure there will be subcultures, other people will do their thing, you can’t please them all! There are Rock-ers, Hiphop-ers or whatever. The important part is that a lot people want in, even if they don’t admit it. They will style up, make sure they look good, bring a few extra girls to make sure they get in and are extremely happy when they pass the gates to the inside!

The whole trick is that you make it exclusive. Creatives are the lucky ones, they don’t need a bouncer to make this happen in the creative scene, even though it certainly helps.

Ten ways to produce exclusive output that has value

1. Create works with your signature on them. The signature is what makes those works special.

2. Unique print editions are more favourable than endless prints. The same goes for special or limited editions. You can have a great output, but if you really want to create a following make sure that your works, even if you create a lot of them, are not available everywhere, that will make them more important to collectors and clients.

3. Build a community around you and use it to create money through advertisements and sponsors. If you can’t monetize your work, make sure you find others who pay you for it, you don’t have to charge the consumers directly.

4. Create a personality that attracts people. Rock Stars and Artists are naturally attractive, they have this out of the society Rebel bonus that helps them to deliver a message and most of all, to be real. Someone who does not give jack about what others think of him.

5. Be someone people want to interact with, be entertaining and extravagant. It’s far easier to leverage yourself if you are someone who creates emotions rather than being a dull-boring-average loser no-one takes interest in. “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.” Dae-su Oh

You don’t need a bouncer to create exclusive value, but it certainly helps.

6. Don’t let everyone in your circle, rather team up with friends. It’s good to interact with people around you, but you have to somehow keep some distance.

7. Protect your privacy, sure you can share everything, but that gets boring faster than you can say Whupsie. Don’t make the mistake of thinking when share everything about yourself people will love you. People want to know everything, but once they do the interest fades away. Make sure there is some mystery around your life.

8. Give away things for free to a selected few and charge the others. Just like the disco example you are letting people in who will take care of your promotion, make you more attractive and soon others want to be part of it.

9. Be unavailable. Don’t reply or interact with someone right away, make sure you have enough stuff to do that you don’t have the time to simply do that. It’s not about faking something, it’s about creating rules for yourself. Set hours where you are available, it will help you to organize your life plus makes you more interesting.

10. The most important lesson you have to learn when you want to add value to something is to value it yourself. There will always be people who won’t like your work! Do what pleases you and what makes you real, don’t be a fake puppet following trends, create them yourself with your works.

Conclusion

Being the best you can be and making the best out of your works is nothing to be ashamed of. Whenever you start to create something, you have get down to the roots, what do you want to be:
Do you want to be famous? Do you want to be commercial? Do you want to be a rebel? Do you want everyone to wear your clothes? Do you want your pictures to hang in every living room or in a gallery? How do you want to be recognized within your scene? …
Make sure you know what you want to do and follow a plan. Don’t let others push you around.

When you browse twitter you see so many badly designed twitter backgrounds, and if the design doesn’t suck, sometimes the coding does. How do you design a twitter background? Let’s take a look at smashill’s new twitter background. As you can see this is a single picture with black background. Why did I choose to design this way?

1. I wanted a good quality image without many compression artifacts, that’s why I choose a smaller image size.

2. I didn’t want a background that repeats itself over and over because I decided to add text.

3. I didn’t want the background color having troubles with the image.

The rules for thoughtful twitter design

First of there are two things to consider:
1. you are limited to 800k background images and 2. can’t alter much of the CSS. Due to these challenges you will have to adapt a bit.
There are two possible designs you can create at twitter that will look good, no matter which resolution.
One way is to create a tiling background, tiling as in to every side, as it will repeat to every side. A good example for this is the twitter background of Ray Frenden, he uses the same background on his homepage Frenden.com, you should check that one out as well


As you can see the Zombies on his background are repeating perfectly and no matter which resolution, the background will always look the same. Besides this the size and compression of the background image is good, as it is crystal clear and has no signs of compression artifacts.

The other way to create a background design is to create an image whose borders have the same color as your html background color. Let’s look at my twitter design for this example.



To make a long story short, you can see how the background image merges with the background color on the right side. You can add images only to the left side, that makes image to background relation-considerartions a necessary evil.

Conclusion

• Don’t use gradients. Gradients are so web 2.0, but they suck at twitter! Don’t think of the browser as some 1280*x or 1680*x background, some people have far far far bigger resolutions, and those people see a harsh border on your otherwise beautiful design.
• Match the color of your background image with the html code color, pick a websafe color.
• Don’t make the image to big, rather go for a smaller compression. Huge images assume the reader has a certain resolution in case they don’t blend with the background, and the compression articfacts make them usually look rather ugly. Rather go for a small but clean background.
• Tiling backgrounds are fun and you can easily create cool images, just google it there are plenty of tutorials. Don’t break the golden rule though and put your contact information on a tiling background.
• A twitter background is not hard to design, take some time to make it look good and professional, or simply stick to the generic twitter background.

Twitter is a great tool, some profit more of it than others, but what about creative people? Is twitter any good for them? Let’s take a look at some real life examples.

Warren Ellis - Author, Comic Writer, Human Meat Rambler
120 Following_profile // 26,119 Followers_profile // 3,674 updates

Warren Ellis is an author, and he must be one of the best self promoters out there. He does what he does best… rant and ramble, and market his works. His blog is a collection of obscurities, his twitterings are a collection of everything and nothing. He is a great entertainer, that’s for sure and he is building and taking care of his fan-base with his twitter account. So yes, I am sure his blog and twitter account generate him quite a lot publicity and sales. His online presence probably landed him some other gigs such as his new wired column as well.

Collis - One of the guys behind the envato network
39 Following_profile // 6,374 Followers_profile // 624 updates

Collis is one of the founders of the envato network, including such famous brand-names as freelanceswitch and psdtuts. He mainly uses his twitter account to submit either some news related to the web, or he simply promotes posts and special events at one of his bazillion sites. Overall it’s probably a great traffic aggregator for him, and with his following to follower ratio and the recognition he acquired, I am pretty sure his new blog at the netsetter will lead him to some sort of fame. He is a strategist and you can see this with his use twitter.

Ben Templesmith - Comic Artist and twitter maniac
200 Following_profile 4,627 Followers_profile 11,141 updates

Ben Templesmith is a comic artists, he creates some twisted artworks and has a distinct style. That can be said for his twittering as well. He let’s you take part in his creative processes, curses like a drunken sailor and uses his account to leverage his works. The reader is pretty fast close to someone who is working night-shifts and interacting with his followers. It’s something that you simply have to be part of once you join it.

Skellie - To make it short, she is a Writer
2,288 Following_profile // 2,297 Followers_profile // 812 updates

Skellie is a great blog writer, offering plenty of advice for freelancers and she created a few very useful blogs and her own blog skelliewag is a great resource for everyone wanting to write / freelance. So how does she use twitter? It’s pretty much a stumble and share with occasional chats. Her links are usually interesting enough that I click on them. The only thing that is obvious is the bit of mystery, as there are only very few information about Skellie’s personal life available, which is a very interesting approach in our times I like. There is too much personal information out there anyways.

Neil Gaiman - Author
249 Following_profile // 192,926 Followers_profile // 1,944 updates

Amazing figures. Just shows how twitter enables fan’s to follow their favorite authors very easy. I wonder how his interaction scheme is looking like, as he is a very active communicator at twitter. Most of his twitter talk is chat with other twitteres, so it’s some good old listening to those peeps at the other table. Highly enjoyable and gives the average joe the feeling of being part of something.

Ray Frenden - Illustrator
107 Following_profile // 748 Followers_profile // 1,449 updates

Ray designs mainly T-Shirts and band merchandise, he has a cool blog running and shares a lot of his progress works on flickr. That’s where his twitter account sets it. Rather than simply posting a run up of his work on his blog, he showcases his progress while he is working at it. It’s like standing in the studio and looking over his shoulder. Besides that he is a really cool and laid back guy(at least it seems) and it’s good to have a chat about his work every once in a while. In case he ever decides to do more than just illustration work, I am pretty sure he will have a pretty big fan-base fast, as most people love his work and share it with others.

Surfstation - The mother of all design e-zines
0 Following_profile // 505 Followers_profile // 866 updates

Well maybe there was australian in front or design is kinky, but after all surfstation blew me away in the late 90s. They had the sickest collection of artistic and design related links, and after some time of being away, they came back with a blast. Their twitter account is just another form of broadcasting their message. Simple concept, done well. If you are into design or art and like fresh stuff, this is what you should be reading.

Andrew Shepherd - Photographer
139 Following_profile // 449 Followers_profile // 3,040 updates

Andrew seems to be very active at twitter, but somehow he does not have a lot followers, even though he takes cool photos. It feels as he is using twitter solely as a way to communicate and have a little chat here and there. If he wants that, fine Overall his stream lacks a bit of the extra special sauce these others have and I am pretty sure that he could build a pretty big follower base if he decided to work on this flaw.

The 5 rules to a successful Twitter account

• Don’t add everyone, be very selective
• Share something that’s special about you, give insight into your work
• Build a community, let people be part of something
• Use twitter to leverage your work
• Give something extra only on the twitter account

Conclusion

Twitter is a great tool for Creatives. It’s probably one of the best tools to keep in touch with your fan-base and to deepen the relationships. A loyal follower is part of a really cheap street-team.
That’s easily achievable for celebrities, but harder for upcoming Creatives. In case you really want to leverage your twitter world, simply start creating something unique. Don’t listen to these whole bullshit twitter memes. It’s not important to be social, it’s not important to add everyone. It’s simply important to be unique and to add a certain style. Share your work and thoughts!
Let your followers be part of something bigger and make them feel good when they join you. No matter if you are the best rambler on the planet or the nicest person on earth… give others something by joining your stream. Which should actually be really easy if you are creative.

Sunday should be a day off for almost everyone, even freelancers, and to celebrate this there is a small freebie on every Sunday.

Feel free to use those textures for any project, but don’t sell or offer them for download. No attribution needed, but appreciated. See below for download link & enjoy.

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Enjoy the time off and have a good time. If you are not celebrating easter, have a good time nevertheless!