Welcome Back!

Well hello there fellow Artists, Designers and Art lovers. As some of you may have noticed, Dock has taken a bit of a hiatus over the last few months. As usual, the Christmas and New Year period took over most of our lives and it’s taken a month or so to recover. Not to mention the dreaded dissertation deadlines that some of us have had to struggle through this January. If that was you, well done! You did it! We’re very proud.

Now, back to us. Although much of the break was spent, of course, stuffing ourselves silly with Christmas dinner, booze and a hell of a lot of chocolate, we’ve also been putting our heads together and developing some cool stuff behind the scenes. Our biggest aim at the moment is to make Dock a more user friendly place for our registered Artists and Designers.

As it stands, we gain the majority of our content from our Creatives through email. Sounds fairly simple, but if you’ve ever sent an email with more than one image attached you’ll know it’s a right old faff. Luckily, co-founder Chris is a web development whizz and he’s been working away creating a Dock Portal to solve all our admin strife and your email woes.

Very soon, each of our registered Artists and Designers will be given a Dock user login which will allow you to access your personal account within the portal. Once you’re in, you’ll be able to update any information about yourself, your work, any past and present exhibitions or shows, etc. etc. You’ll also be able to upload any images or videos along with descriptions of your work, all of which will be shown on your Dock Profile. This will give you much better control of your own public image on the site, and also allows you to continuously update your profile as your creative careers develop. Sounding better already, huh?

Another new feature we’re working on is the Dock Calendar. This calendar will be accessible to all our readers, Artists, Designers, and any other lost souls that stumble upon us. Registered Creatives will be able to use their shiny new logins to access the Dock Calendar and enter any events they may have coming up and would like to promote. This is not only a great way of encouraging our readers to get out and check out some cool exhibitions of fresh new work, it also allows Dock to promote each and all of these events on the site and through social media.

Currently, we don’t have an exact date as to when Dock Portal and Dock Calendar will be available, but in the meantime we’ll do our best to entertain our readers. As well as interviews, studio tours and exhibition reviews, yours truly will be doing her best to keep you all in the know about the ins and outs of a soon-to-graduate-student-artist’s daily life through our Dock Blog. Hopefully it'll help those of you in a similar position feel a little less alone on a sinking ship.

Oh, and once again we’d like to encourage any Artists or Designers out there to get in touch or register with us through the site. People want to see your work, and we want to show it to them! It’s easy peasy, just go to the bottom of our About or Artists pages and click the register button. It really does take two ticks. Trust me, I’ve done it.

And, if you’re a writer and would like to have your work featured on Dock, whether it’s an article, a musing or even an artsy haiku, we’d love to hear from you too! Just send us an email about yourself and your work and we’ll get the ball rolling.

Finally, just a quick note: If there’s anything you’d like to see from us, or ask us, or ask one of our Creatives, please go right ahead. You can contact us through social media or send us a quick email. We love feedback, we love questions, and we especially love a natter.

We’re looking forward to the future. Hope you are too!