MUTANT MEDIA GRACES THE PAGES OF COMMUNICATION ARTS MAGAZINE
The website Mutant Media designed and built for illustrator Adam Gustavson (www.adamgustavson.com) was commended by Communication Arts in their 46th Illustration Annual for its self-promotional value (page 115 for the curious).
Curious if Adam had noticed a link between having an award-winning website and tangible business value, we called him to ask. And his answer was a resounding yes.
Pre-internet illustrators had three primary means of gaining exposure from potential employers: referrals from happy clients, mailing work samples to prospects, and placing an ad in the annual Illustration Sourcebook. With the new website, Adam notes that "Cold calls are up five-hundred percent." Further, the website allows him to show a greater diversity of work than a single page in the Sourcebook, so that he's getting "much more educated calls," on which he's able to spend less time talking about his range of styles.
He notes that the exposure is broader than with the sourcebooks as well. "People can figure out a lot more about what I do without making the commitment of actually calling."
And there's a substantial dollar savings as well. In contacting prospective employers via a campaign of direct mailings, Adam could expect to spend five to seven dollars per contact. That figure has been cut by more that seventy percent.
Asked what his favorite aspect of the site was, Adam mentioned the site's usability. "My three-year-old knew how to get around it in about five minutes." That, and Jimmy the Rhinoceros Boy finally achieved the stardom he's so richly deserved.