I think it’s inevitable at the end of a year to reflect upon the past year while also looking ahead to where you want to direct yourself in the new year. When I look at Artprof.org, part of me takes pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish in a short time period with very few resources. The other part of me has a burning desire to figure out what past strategies haven’t been as effective, and what we can concretely change for the better.
Change is a curse and a blessing in a project like Artproforg. We are lucky in that we have 100% creative freedom, there is no one we have to report to or get approval from to create our content. On the other hand, that also means to me that we have a responsibility to continually improve upon what we have done in the past, which means continual change in terms of how we do things.
Compared to the chaos of the beginning of the project in 2015, (which I think is unavoidable when you start a project like this from scratch) Artprof.org is relatively stable right now, but it’s always a concerted effort on my part to not drive my staff up the wall by changing things left and right. While logistical matters have become a lot more predictable, we are nowhere near being on automatic pilot.
While change is necessary for the project to progress, boy, can change be incredibly tedious; I’m not joking when I say that I spent an entire day on redoing the tags for our videos on our YouTube channel, or that I probably renamed each video course 3 times before I settled on ones that were clear enough but also loaded up with keywords to help boost our SEO!
As much work as all of these tasks are, change to me always feels good. While there’s always the risk that something may not work out, it doesn’t matter to me, I’ll just try something else.
Artprof.org is a free website for learning visual arts which features video tutorials, art critiques, and more.
Clara Lieu 