Over the years at Artists UK we have improved our ecommerce software for www.artistsuk.co.uk several times to give our customers a better shopping experience.  We’ve made the site work faster, smoother and made it more logically organised.  It has a powerful SEARCH facility and there are buttons all over the place allowing customers to contact us by email if they have questions.  We then built up this information site with a brand new logo designed by the excellent team at Farbweiss Media in Germany who also designed the website for us.  Somehow along the way we never got round to updating the original Artists UK logo and we realised for some time how static and dated it was looking, especially compared to the Artists UK DotNet logo so we’ve finally gopt round to vamping it up into a more dynamic modern version.  We hope you like it.  You can see it here.

We’re not quite sure where the credit crunch is crunching because we’ve been rushed off our feet all summer with orders from our customers and various trade projects!  So busy there has been a substantial Blogbreak here but hopefully we’ll be writing a bit more over the coming week’s than has been the case recently.  If you haven’t visited our ecommerce site recently at www.artistsuk.co.uk then you might like to take a look as there are lots of new items all over the place.  Use the SEARCH function because not everything has found a home on the Updates Page yet although you will probably find a few things there you didn’t know had arrived.

Well, here it is at long last! The all-brand-new Artists UK DotNet website we’ve been working on. Pretty much all the old content is still here but with new features and content added. You can now search the whole of Artists UK DotNet from the search box at the bottom of the sidebar. Just enter text and click enter. The results will show in the main panel. Do you like it? Tell us what you think and what you’d like to see on the website either by leaving a comment or using the Contact Us form. Remember that all you have to do is click on the Comments link on any of the Blog entrries to leave your own comment.

The phone rang and a gentleman asked to be put through to one of the most famous artists we deal with ostensibly because he is trying to track down someone this artist knows in order to ensure they get the back-royalties they are owed. A noble venture we can only praise and support. However, the gentleman in question seemed unable to comprehend that the artists featured on our website are not in fact resident at Artists UK’s offices!

My mind was filled with the wonderful idea of all these artists from present and past living and working at Artists UK. Salvador Dali might be in the restaurant chatting with Bob Venosa (that’s no surprise since they did know each other) but what about Brian Froud, Alan Lee and a few others having lunch with Arthur Rackham? It would be lovely to see Josh Kirby back again and the corridors could be filled with his Voyage of the Ayeguy paintings! There’d be a group of old TSR artists and Magic would be Gathering in the bar. What would Picasso think of digital imaging? William Blake might be rather shocked by Todd Lockwood’s War of Angels. Sulamith Wulfing and Susan Seddon-Boulet in mutual admiration? Cicely Mary Barker and Beatrix Potter would probably be astounded at some of the modern fairy paintings and fantasy illustrations but perhaps feel that they were a bit too gaudy for their taste. Rodney Matthews and William Blake might have a fair bit in common … or possibly not. Who knows? Who would you like to see in the great art skyscraper?

We did of course forward the gentleman’s request to the artist concerned and hopefully a particular writer will get the royalties he’s due … and they all lived happily everafter