There are some wonderful art communities growing on Magma. Deciding to run a contest for Artspaces and letting you show us what’s possible, we knew our judges were going to have a tough time. But at last, the wait is over. We’re ready to announce the winners of our first Artspace contest.

We looked at how you set your Artspace up, the collaboration of your Artspace banner, the format of your Art Jams and how they were run, the quality and relevance of chat and feed posts, and other interesting and unexpected things you might be doing beyond just the contest requirements. We were excited by what we saw, and it was an EXTREMELY close race between the top handful of Artspaces.

So enough jabbering… here they are…

First Prize - VocaSpace

The profile page being customized in various ways with formatted text and relavant images to break up sections and add colour makes a good first impression before joining.

There are quite a few channels creating a dedicated space for more focused chats but also a handy channel guide to help newcomers get acquainted. They also make use of roles gather specific groups of fans.

Second prize - Comics

This Artspace has a unique focus for creating collaborative comics together, and hosts regular themed Art Jams for this. The co-owners responds with meaningful answers and advice, and even have some instructive boards to help newcomers with creating better comics.

Third prize - The Sweatshop

This Artspace always has events on the schedule which is visible on the profile. Much of the time one is upcoming and one is live, meaning newcomes immediately have something to participate in beyond the chat.

Hosting high-quality events also yields high-quality posting on the Artspace Feed and Gallery which is a treat to scroll through.

Then the runner-ups! In no particular order…

• Diligent Students - consistent and strong learning-focused space with regular long-running Jams;

• MCYT - very engaged Minecraft Artspace with individually moderated channels;

• Eeveelution - Niche Pokemon community;

• Hyruleans - Legend of Zelda space with interesting character redesign challenges and themed remixes;

• Animal Club - Interesting use of member roles to create feline and canine teams which could leads to some fun internal Artspace activities and contests;

• Learn and Teach - another artspace for learning and sharing digital art techniques;

• The Coop - animals and birds are the focus of this Artspace hosting different themed Art Jams and challenges;

Congratulations and well done everyone. We’ll be in touch with the Artspace owners via email next week to discuss allocation of your prizes. We’re excited to see your activities continue in the month ahead, and look forward to what comes next.

Things we noticed….

Artspaces with scheduled events displayed on the profile page shows newcomers that the group is active and gives them something to look forward to. Many of the winning spaces always had an event either running our upcoming. If your interest is in regular study sessions, the diligent students Artspace always have a session planned for you to level up, while The Sweatshop offers some different challenge to apply your skills.

Having a lot of channels can make it overwhelming to navigate an Artspace for new joiners. Keeping important things at the top like announcements, rules, and general chat make it easier for a new member to understand the space and jump into conversations. The MCYT space took this a step further by using emojis to color-code channel categories.

Using Roles, you can highlight members of the community like your admins or community contest winner. The Animal Club chose to have Feline and Canine teams in the space which we think could lead to some fun internal activities and contests.

Thank you for joining

This was the first contest focused on Artspaces that we’ve run, and we’re learning a lot in the process, but even more from how you put Magma features to work to build a vibrant community. So, thank you to everyone that partipated!

If your Artspace didn’t make the list, we hope that you still continue to nurture the group you gathered, keep chatting, and draw awesome stuff together... because that is what Magma is about💎