There is a new type of social website appearing on the internets. Designed with the designer, artist and writer in mind, websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo help individual artist crowd fund their new projects. The idea is to bypass the publisher, connecting the artist directly with their public. The artist uploads a project propasal to the site. This might be, for example, an outline of a printed comic book. The artist specifies what the completed project would be and amount that they need to created it then asks for pledges from the public. If the pledge total reaches the target within a fixed amount of time then the project goes ahead and only then are the public asked to pay up.

I've been eyeing these websites up for a while, wondering if they might be a good way to produce a printed book of some of the work on robives.com. It turns out that David Landis of Desktop Gremlins fame has the same idea and has launched his own Kickstarter campaign here. (If you have not already seen David's work, hurry along to his website and have a look round.)

My idea would be to produce a book of perhaps six projects. The artwork shown here is only to grab your attention. For a book I would be aiming to produce either completely new projects or at least twists and re-workings of existing projects. This is all very much up in the air at the moment but I'd be really interested to hear your comments, ideas, questions and whether you would be at all interested.