A little bit about me:
Hi there everyone,
My name is Alexander, I'm a Graphic Designer/Social Media Manager/Illustrator/Marketing person from Australia.
I used to work for a multinational company in their marketing department and was hoping to help out the Krita Project by helping out with marketing.
However I realise now that there isn't really a marketing "department" as such at this point of time. I'm a massive fan of the Krita project and think it is
amazing what the community has done so far, Krita really is a showcase of just how powerful the open source community is.

What I'm proposing/offering:
What I'd like to do is essentially provide marketing support for Krita (for free, obviously) to help bring attention to the project.
Hopefully by bringing more attention the the project I can encourage more people to volunteer their time (and possibly money) to help the Krita project grow.
There are many tools at our disposal that can help make Krita an even stronger force to be reckoned with, all whilst keeping Krita free and open to the community.
There are many things that I would like to do and i'll just post a short bullet list of some of them.

• Create marketing collateral (banners, brochures, signatures, etc) to help boost brand awareness.
• Update press kit and keep it up to date.
• Create tutorial templates for ease of use and consistency.
• Utilise Art communities (such as deviantart) to help gain new users.
• Create and promote volunteer recruitment content for social media channels.
• Liaise with online publishers to encourage press coverage for Krita.
• Promote Krita's updates and accomplishments via social media channels.
• Promote Krita to educational facilities around the world to encourage the use of the software.
• Create collateral for pitching Krita to educational facilities.
• soooo much more stuff.
  

A bit more text to read...
I understand what I'm pitching/offering requires input from the entire community, I'm suggesting a fairly big change that would require a lot of people to have faith in my abilities, my ideas and my morality/trustworthiness. I'm happy to create a few examples of collateral and even provide the basics for a marketing/social media plan to show how serious I am about this, I really want to help Krita grow as i believe it is an invaluable tool for illustrators all over the world.

So i leave it to the community and developers, what are your thoughts and feelings about what I am proposing? Is it something you would like to support? please let me know your thoughts whether they are for or against this.

Sincerely: Alex. B.

My current priority list is as follows:

• Get Instagram set up.
• Schedule Facebook content.
• Create marketing graphics for social platforms.
• Create roughs for brochure template.
• Move House + Studio without spontaneously combusting.

500Yen wrote:A bit more text to read...
I understand what I'm pitching/offering requires input from the entire community, I'm suggesting a fairly big change that would require a lot of people to have faith in my abilities, my ideas and my morality/trustworthiness. I'm happy to create a few examples of collateral and even provide the basics for a marketing/social media plan to show how serious I am about this, I really want to help Krita grow as i believe it is an invaluable tool for illustrators all over the world...

Sincerely: Alex. B.

Hi Alex, I'm a common user only and I just read your post, really interesting and what a great offer, and you just landed in a very open and friendly community too, in my humble opinion what's even better, is that the "fairly big change" you are projecting may not big entirely from scratch, as far as I can tell, there are already some of the ideas/initiatives you propose running, but as you had figure, all of the venues relay on volunteers and the extra time the developers can squeeze out of their daily routines to keep those venues on, such as facebook, devianart, the wiki, webpage, G+, etc. A fully dedicated person to organize the marketing venues as a whole, sound very good indeed. Krita can always use every bit of help anyone can offer, thanks!

Hi Alexander,

As Krita's maintainer I'm doing a great deal of these things myself, and I sure would appreciate help! Of course, we've already gotten some things organized:

* Irina does the interviews, fulfilment of the webshop, merchandise production and helps with twitter
* Wolthera does tutorials, tumblr, deviantart (I think... I haven't checked dA myself for ages) manual, development, helps preparing fund raisers, works on release announcements and helps with twitter
* Scott does the website, has written a book on Krita in English, helps with ux design and development, and works on release announcements.
* Raghukamath helps with reddit
* Timotimo works on updating the steam store

There are also active translators, especially for Russian and Japanese.

What I'm currently doing myself -- and often failing to do is:

* prepease release brochure (2.8 was the last one I managed to make: https://files.kde.org/krita/marketing/2.8/)
* prepare fund raisers -- we're going to have an emergency fund raiser real soon now
* make the release binaries
* hang out on forums, irc and reddit to help users
* manage twitter and g+ and fail to manage facebook (I don't get facebook)
* present krita at art academies
* do some of the design work for e.g. the art book
* manage windows store
* keep in touch with journalists and editors for e.g. cgsociety and imaginefx
* administration

and of course

* development...

What's really needed is someone to manage the facebook community and prepare detailed, art-studded release brochures, preferably in time for translation for releas. Also, we're currently more or less neglecting the wikipedia page, places like artstation or pinterest. And probably a lot I'm not thinking about right now.

boudewijn wrote:Hi Alexander,

As Krita's maintainer I'm doing a great deal of these things myself, and I sure would appreciate help! Of course, we've already gotten some things organized:

* Irina does the interviews, fulfilment of the webshop, merchandise production and helps with twitter
* Wolthera does tutorials, tumblr, deviantart (I think... I haven't checked dA myself for ages) manual, development, helps preparing fund raisers, works on release announcements and helps with twitter
* Scott does the website, has written a book on Krita in English, helps with ux design and development, and works on release announcements.
* Raghukamath helps with reddit
* Timotimo works on updating the steam store

There are also active translators, especially for Russian and Japanese.

What I'm currently doing myself -- and often failing to do is:

* prepease release brochure (2.8 was the last one I managed to make: https://files.kde.org/krita/marketing/2.8/)
* prepare fund raisers -- we're going to have an emergency fund raiser real soon now
* make the release binaries
* hang out on forums, irc and reddit to help users
* manage twitter and g+ and fail to manage facebook (I don't get facebook)
* present krita at art academies
* do some of the design work for e.g. the art book
* manage windows store
* keep in touch with journalists and editors for e.g. cgsociety and imaginefx
* administration

and of course

* development...

What's really needed is someone to manage the facebook community and prepare detailed, art-studded release brochures, preferably in time for translation for releas. Also, we're currently more or less neglecting the wikipedia page, places like artstation or pinterest. And probably a lot I'm not thinking about right now.

I was having a chat with Scott and he gave me a brief idea of who managed different aspects of Krita. Right now i'm looking over all the current channels that Krita has a presence on to see how they operate and how they can be improved. I'm also looking through all existing marketing material/press material. Raghukamath and Wolthera also helped get me up to date with the current situation especially regarding the volunteers that are currently doing a lot of promoting themselves.

As for facebook, it's one of my strengths so that is something i can easily help out with. I also wasnt able to find an instagram page for Krita (if there is one please let me know)

I don't think we have instagram so that should be created; I understand instagram even less than facebook. If you mail me at foundation@krita.org, I can share the keys to our facebook account with you.

I think I'll just add a little feedback about Krita. A lot of time, Krita is being marketed as a digital painting application, but Paintstorm has a much greater focus on that in comparison with Krita, and some people use Krita as an alternative to Photoshop as it can also be used as a image-editing software and a 2D rendering software. What I'm saying is that there should be more honesty about the direction of Krita, and I have read a few reviews saying Krita seem to be lost in direction.

Here's a discussion of interest - http://krita-free-art-app.deviantart.com/

Look at the latest post and I am ReptillianSP2011

Um... That almost sounds like I'm being accused of dishonesty... Krita _is_ about painting. That is what we, the developers, focus on. I know you've been trying to push Krita as a photoshop clone in various places, but in all honesty, I, as the Krita maintainer, couldn't care less about that. Krita is for creating original works of art from scratch. That's what I work on and work for.

If people can use it for other things, fine, but that is accidental.

I honestly don't understand how anyone can come to the conclusion Krita isn't made for painting.
I never thought much of the image editing features.
Not saying they are bad I simply never cared much about them, they work as they should.

Also Reptorian, I never heard of Krita losing it's way or not being made for paiting before so I doubt that's the majority of the opinions about Krita.

I think what is probably not understood here is that in general, when people come to us with patches and are friendly and enthusiastic, we don't care whether the feature is more image edity or painterly. So when a friendly dev comes to us with a smart fill/patch tool, we say 'hell yeah, come here'.

On top of that when we do kickstarters, even though we try to choose stretchgoals that are more painterly, a lot of the people backing us use Krita in game art and matte painting workflows, and they need sturdy editing tools like non-destructive editing in the form of masks, good interoperability and automation tools, like python scripting. These people are able to be our backers, because they do parts of their daily living with Krita. If you look at the last kickstarter, there were many different painterly things, but people really wanted python scripting and people really wanted svg export.

Similarly, while people just throwing money at Krita because we're a badass open source project aren't unheard of, people who use Krita in studios do fund us as well and we have contracts to improve such things as interoperability, speed providing appimages(they're the most favourite thing of the vfx people we've talked about, because they are literally the opposite of adobe's subscription sceme). These are things that boud and dmitry do for their daily bread.

On top of that, we also do maintaining of Krita. That is fixing bugs, removing dead code, making sure Krita is buildable, maintaining build instructions, making builds for three different platforms. And that is only the code side. There's also maintaining the manual, and helping people to use Krita.

And we even haven't gotten to the actual community side stuff, which is what this thread is about. And on that end we have the artists' interviews, we answer questions, and we try our best to help everyone. You wanna know what the most linked page is of the manual outside of the FAQ? It's this one.

My point here is that we are not just a open source painting project. We're badass open source painting project. And we are able to do that because we are doing our hardest to be a friendly open source project. And that, more than anything is the lifeblood of us being as successful as we are.

If you feel we are not able to be a proper painting project because of this necessity to be a friendly open source project, then help us. Help us bug triage, help us answer people's questions on the forum, help out on social media.

The bug mentioned in that deviantart thread is not a bug in the brush engines. It is a bug in the compositing code. It is a bug that people have been trying to fix for years, and while there is a possible fix(compositing in 16 bits instead of 8 ), an unwise following of that solution will make Krita much slower for no reason. The reports are 348267 and 356462, they are both(together?) the most difficult bugs in the whole bug tracker. Anyone is welcome to give them a try. Similarly, you are welcome to come and try implement GPU brushes, if they are so easy to implement with just some hard work.

So in summary, people who back us during kickstarters are people who need a painting program that is able to do rigorous editing tasks and deal with production requirements. These are typically people in the entertainment industries of vfx, mattepainting and games. These guys cause us to focus on very good transform tools and python scripting, for instance. We ourselves do push for more artsy features, like improving the pop-up palette, making sure there's a good enough text tool for comics, the assistants, implementing a smart colorize tool, implementing frame-by-frame animation, working on improvements in the palette docker. We ourselves also push to maintain Krita. And we push to be a kind and friendly community.

This means we are not going to be snootily deciding something isn't painterly enough when someone comes in with a patch, so we're not going to say no when Eugene comes in with his smart patch tool or his improvements to the histogram, despite these being more editing features than painting features. But we also have things like the new airbrush system that Allan has been working on for months, despite none of us ever coming across him in the IRC or having any other contact beyond the phabricator patches, and that sure as hell is painterly.

We're not just any sort of open source painting project, we're a friendly open source painting project. And that allows us to be badass.

ReonPG wrote:I honestly don't understand how anyone can come to the conclusion Krita isn't made for painting.
I never thought much of the image editing features.
Not saying they are bad I simply never cared much about them, they work as they should.

Also Reptorian, I never heard of Krita losing it's way or not being made for paiting before so I doubt that's the majority of the opinions about Krita.

The guy I was talking to in deviantart in the link seem to think that the brush engine is one of the weakest aspect of Krita in comparison with other feature, and there's some few articles that does seem to be in the position that Krita does not have a direction or is more or less all-in-one program, but that does not imply Krita isn't for painting, but it does imply Krita can be used for anything other than painting. But, that being said, I love Krita for having other things other than things exclusive for painting program like Black Ink or Paintstorm. What I'm saying is that Krita could market itself a bit more than just a painting program seeing as there are users who don't really paint there as much as digital painters, and there are definitely people out there who enjoy Krita more than GIMP as a image-editing tool. I am a product designer, and Krita got everything I could want besides issues with big canvas, but everything in Krita is definitely what I love. It's missing good selection tools, but other than that, I love it. Most of the time, I use non-destructive editing to be able to change colors with ease, and to change textures. Painting for me is only there to define the lighting/shadow and that's it, while the rest can be easily done with Krita non-destructive editing. If I wanted to edit a image in Krita, and keep it nondestructive, I have the option of doing that with Krita, and I would do that to change photographs of a product to see how it would look in other colors. There isn't a way I can't live without Krita's nondestructive feature.

TheraHedwig wrote:I think what is probably not understood here is that in general, when people come to us with patches and are friendly and enthusiastic, we don't care whether the feature is more image edity or painterly. So when a friendly dev comes to us with a smart fill/patch tool, we say 'hell yeah, come here'.

Yeah, that's what I love about Krita and its developers. You push some features that enables Krita to be an all-in-one program, and more of those features makes it all the more appealing. Also, Krita has the best rate of development of all the open-source raster-editing/painting programs from what I'm seeing with interoperability, and so on.

But, anyway, for the marketing, all I'm trying to point out is that I would be happy to see Krita market itself as a primarily a painting software, but can be used for other things such as non-destructive image-editing while making it clear it can be used that way.

Reptorian, do you understand though, it really hurts when you say we are not being honest?

The thing is, we really don't want to have a photo-editing crowd as our prime target audience, because we will not be able to handle the community effort necessary to handle photo editing crowd. And you know, we wanna make a painting program

Cestarian, btw, is someone we're ignoring because he is talking out of his **** 90% of the time. He is constantly telling us we fail as an open source project all the time, and that we should port to Vulkan(This is like telling a car mechanic he should use a hammer and nails instead of bolts). I already pointed out that the thing he was talking about was the compositing bug and that it is the most difficult issue in the whole bugtracker, it isn't in the brush engine.

And this counts for a whole lot of other people, do realise that a whole lot of people don't understand that an open source project accepts volunteer code, so a lot of people don't understand what it means when a smart patch tool shows up all of the sudden. And once you realize that, it isn't surprising they have no idea where the project is going because they don't understand open source at all.

I always read positive things about Krita's Brush Engine.

@Reptorian
At this point I think Krita can market itself more broadly as some kind of "art creation software" rather than a just painting software, given that it's got features for both frame-by-frame animation and (soon updated) vector graphics editing. Personally I think these features a bit ahead of Krita's time but they're very welcome features nonetheless. So yeah, in a sense it's a bit dishonest to say Krita is a software for painting seeing as she can do so much more (though I'm hoping photo editing won't be getting too much attention anytime soon)!

As for the critique Krita's brush engines apparently are receiving:
I think it's difficult to bash Krita for having minor kinks here and there given the feature set in relation to team size, the business model (i.e. free and open source), and age of the software. 30 years of development by a larger team with a pretty steady stream of income has allowed for Photoshop to get a bit more polish than Krita . But despite the flaws Krita's set of brush engines is by no means weak (especially compared to the previous example of Photoshop). Krita is rapidly improving and expanding at the same time as well, and we're seeing additions like the Quick Brush engine and the upcoming GSoC Watercolor Engine further making Krita's case as a well-endowed painting software.

Krita is an amazing software and the devs really deserve all the cred they can get.

TheraHedwig wrote:Reptorian, do you understand though, it really hurts when you say we are not being honest?

The thing is, we really don't want to have a photo-editing crowd as our prime target audience, because we will not be able to handle the community effort necessary to handle photo editing crowd. And you know, we wanna make a painting program

Cestarian, btw, is someone we're ignoring because he is talking out of his **** 90% of the time. He is constantly telling us we fail as an open source project all the time, and that we should port to Vulkan(This is like telling a car mechanic he should use a hammer and nails instead of bolts). I already pointed out that the thing he was talking about was the compositing bug and that it is the most difficult issue in the whole bugtracker, it isn't in the brush engine.

And this counts for a whole lot of other people, do realise that a whole lot of people don't understand that an open source project accepts volunteer code, so a lot of people don't understand what it means when a smart patch tool shows up all of the sudden. And once you realize that, it isn't surprising they have no idea where the project is going because they don't understand open source at all.

I looked up Vulkan, and can't imagine why would he want to see an API for 3D graphics utilized by a 2D graphic program. I mean 3D tool is something Krita really could benefit from, but now is not the time to even think about that when there is other things to look at first, but it'd be pretty sweet to use a 3D model into Krita and use 3D painting into Krita, but again, I don't believe it's the time. And, as someone who volunteers to support Inkscape, and leave features requests (That's all I can do as a product designer student) there, I have seen some few features that I asked for and they get there with patience as I know someone will eventually look at those idea and see how they are implemented, and reading up on Inkscape mail letters, I know how open source development takes a lot of time, patience, and dedication. There's a relationship between artist (consumer), and the developers, and there's this one thorny issue of artists unable to actually contribute because they don't have the time to learn programming, but can only give feedback to the developers. I don't think any programs out there exists that suits every artists out there. It just does not, but specialization is why things are there. I use Solidworks, Rhino, Autocad, and I know all of those exists for different things, and I use them differently. Likewise, I use Krita and Inkscape for different purposes, but if Inkscape had good gradient mesh support and great rendering speed, I could really just stick with Inkscape and not use any raster program since it has it own painting tool for gradient mesh.

slowjane wrote:@Reptorian
At this point I think Krita can market itself more broadly as some kind of "art creation software" rather than a just painting software, given that it's got features for both frame-by-frame animation and (soon updated) vector graphics editing. Personally I think these features a bit ahead of Krita's time but they're very welcome features nonetheless. So yeah, in a sense it's a bit dishonest to say Krita is a software for painting seeing as she can do so much more (though I'm hoping photo editing won't be getting too much attention anytime soon)!

As for the critique Krita's brush engines apparently are receiving:
I think it's difficult to bash Krita for having minor kinks here and there given the feature set in relation to team size, the business model (i.e. free and open source), and age of the software. 30 years of development by a larger team with a pretty steady stream of income has allowed for Photoshop to get a bit more polish than Krita . But despite the flaws Krita's set of brush engines is by no means weak (especially compared to the previous example of Photoshop). Krita is rapidly improving and expanding at the same time as well, and we're seeing additions like the Quick Brush engine and the upcoming GSoC Watercolor Engine further making Krita's case as a well-endowed painting software.

Krita is an amazing software and the devs really deserve all the cred they can get.

And any new features that would help game artists, concept artists, product designers, and matte painters will eventually might be used for anything other than painting. It seems that Krita is kind of like Photoshop of the open source world, and I say this because feature-wise, if you compare Krita and GIMP, it's clear that Krita is way ahead, and Photoshop workflow match closer to Krita than GIMP. But, selection tools and a few filters put GIMP ahead of Krita in image-editing, but not really that much ahead. If image-editing is something that really needs attention on Krita's end, I'd imagine if GIMP never get their act together and still stick with super slow development, and in that case, people would hope for Krita to work on that area more. But that being said, yeah, I'd prefer if Krita market itself as an art creation software with a few extra since that's probably more accurate considering Krita 4 has updated vector support, healing tool, and so on. Watercolor Engine is something I can see that'll benefit Krita painters, and on my end, I might see it of use for editing shadows and lighting.

Guess who managed to lock themselves out of the forums!
*answer* ME.

Sorry for the lack of discussion, currently moving house + moving my studio and in the process I had a complete brain fart and couldn't remember my username for the forums.

This is just a placeholder post before i write a massive update, keep your eyes and ears peeled.

-Alex