The Creatives Are Community Toolbar beta program has ended, and we now have a final version of the Toolbar released. At the same time, Creatives Are Community is opened to the public. Thank you very much to the great people who helped beta test and refine the Toolbar.

Though right now CreativesAre.com serves just to introduce and supply creative professionals with the Creatives Are Community Toolbar, I’ve got some other great, community-building features planned for this site. Watch and see!

In the meantime, an introduction…

Creatives Are Community was created by Pariah S. Burke (me). Like many of my recent projects, Creatives Are Community and the Creatives Are Community Toolbar began as something I built for myself. First came the bookmark sharing buttons for Ping.fm, Twitter.com, Design Bump, Delicious, Tr.im, and the others. Then I built custom search engines to help me find free stock photography, fonts, Photoshop brushes, vector art, logos, and other things that, frankly, Google wasn’t doing such a great job of helping me find. There’s just so much on the Web these days…

Around the same time I was building this tool for myself I became very active in the creative professional communities among new social media. I’d been on Twitter since the summer of 2008, and have participated in various mailing lists, user groups, and other social networking services for quite some time (two decades, really, ever since Prodigy, GEnie, and CompuServe in the early 90s). But it’s only been in the last year that Web 2.0 has provided the tools and services to truly connect creative professionals, whether the freelancer who hardly ever gets to see anyone or the corporate designer surrounded by offices and cubicles. We–creative professionals–are out here, and we now have unprecedented means of finding one another, of sharing experiences and information, and even of collaborating on projects. And that has drawn me deeply into the world of social media and the growing design communities within it.

Social media for creative professionals excites me so much that I wrote an article on the subject for Macworld (July 2009); wrote about creatives on Twitter and Colour Lovers in two other articles for CreativePro.com, and; built Design Talk Live, a site that collects and presents up-to-the-minute live design-related discussion from Twitter and hundreds of other Websites and services so that anyone can keep up on, and dive into, design-, graphics-, or typography-related discussion no matter where it happens. And, I have even more, similar projects in the works.

The Creatives Are Community Toolbar is another way I’m helping to connect, inform, and empower my creative professional peers.

With the resources on the Community menu and the creative-specific social bookmarking buttons no designer need ever feel isolated again. There are always other creative pros online, ready to answer questions, bounce ideas off, share interesting tutorials and other links, or cheer you up after a rought client critique. All you have to do is spend a minute or two with the Creatives Are Community Toolbar to find the best place and means for you to dive into the vast and growing community of creative professionals on the Web.

The Jobs menu provides resources to not only polish your portfolio, distribute your resume, and join portfolio-centric social networks like Behance and Coroflot, but also to actually find a job, gig, or contract. The latest design job and request for quote listings from thousands of employers and clients are included right on the Creatives Are Community Toolbar Jobs menu, with links to major job posting sites so you can find even more opportunities.

The rest of the toolbar menus–Resources, Freelancing, Inspiration, Typography, Photoshop, InDesign/InCopy, Illustrator, PDF/Acrobat, and QuarkXPress–will keep you informed, inspired, and empowered by delivering the most useful, latest news, articles, tutorials, and design inspirations to you where ever you go on the Web, 24 hours a day. Forget about visiting a dozen sites every day just to stay informed. Let the content come to you with the Creatives Are Community Toolbar!

Can you tell I’m excited and proud of the Creatives Are Community Toolbar? I had never built anything like it before, and it was a lot of work–a labor of love, as it were, something useful I can do for the design community. I hope you like it and find it useful. Give it a try!

Make Contact

Submit your site or another resource for possible inclusion in the Toolbar Creatives Are Community.

Send your feedback, suggestions for improving Creatives Are Community, and problems with the site.

For everything else–including just to say hi–contact me directly. The Connect & Contact page of my personal site lists my e-mail address as well as links to my profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm, and about three dozen other social media, microblogging, and networking sites.

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• Pariah Burke
• Wednesday, 25 March 2009