Having recently delved into the world of crowdfunding via Kickstarter ourselves, we’ve come across lots of current projects that we think deserve peoples’ support. This is the first of a serious of spotlight posts on the projects we’ve found.

“Untitled” by Dom Williams

We actually met Dom Williams at the Cardiff Expo showcase the other week where he was showing off some of his beautiful artwork and comics.

Dom is currently raising funds for a new comic/picture book about a creature who goes on a journey to find new friends. It doesn’t have a title, in fact, it doesn’t have any words; it’s a story in pictures.

His art style is reminiscent of some Japanese animation, with bold shapes and colours and use of strong contrast. The black silhouette characters call to mind shadow theatre which also gives it a strong Asian feel.

Through Dom’s Crowd funder project you can pre-order a copy of the comic with a character sketch for just £10, or pledge more to get some cool extras. Check out Dom’s video for more details or visit his project page:

Crowd Funder – A short review

It was through Dom that we found out about Crowd Funder which is a UK based competitor to Kickstarter, run by the Innovation Centre at the University of Exeter. At first glance it seems to offer an almost identical service to Kickstarter but there are some differences worth noting.

As a backer, the ability to search for project by category and keyword and sort your results by various fields is far superior to Kickstarter’s system which is link based and doesn’t allow you to filter results to refine them.

Crowd Funder also limits a lot of features to registered members. I can’t decide yet whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of potential backers may be put off if they feel pressured into registering on the site just to see all the details and features, but it does offer project promoters the chance to tier access to their material if they so wish.

A quick scan of the projects approaching completion shows a lot are struggling to hit their targets. I think it’s likely the lack of reputation for the site itself (we’d not heard of it before) is one factor. Now that Kickstarter have opened up GBP based UK projects, Crowd Funder and fellow UK competitor Indigogo may find themselves hard pressed to continue attracting projects.

Tagged as: art, artist, children's book, comics, crowd funder, crowdfunding, cute, Dom Williams, friendship, independent, indigogo, Kickstarter, picture book, publishing