deviantART Turning 10 Years Old!

Man... I feel old...

I was 18 when deviantART first opened its doors. I was so young and naive. I had this idealistic vision of an online community of artists, coming together to promote creativity and the freedom of expression. We had no idea that it would actually succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

I got into digital art in high school, like most of the people here. But as I learned, I wanted to return the favor so for every tutorial that I read, I tried to write one as well. My website, Wasted Youth, was the home for all of these tutorials and quickly gained popularity. As I found more free time during college, I wanted to introduce a community aspect to the site, for artists to showcase their creations and tutorials. Scott (jark) and I discussed creating a separate site, which he called screenphukt. I hated this name and the design for it, so we went with deviantART instead. I'm not sure where it came from, but it stuck along with the green design.

The first version was so simple and basic. There was really nothing revolutionary about how the site worked. It was the community of people that flocked to the site that made it special. Experts use the "network effect" to describe the success of simple sites, like Craigslist, and I think that's exactly why deviantART was so special in the early days.

We spent the first few months commenting on every single piece of art that was submitted. I introduced Daily Deviations to feature more art and artists, which proved to be a very successful feature. As people strived to be featured on the homepage, the community seemed to grow organically and exponentially. The forums filled up, the IRC chat rooms filled up, everything on the site seemed to be taking off. 6 months after our launch, we knew we were onto something much bigger than we anticipated.

I will write another followup journal as we get closer to the 10th birthday.