COLOURlovers has announced a new sister site called Creative Market, which will allow digital designers to buy and sell assets like vector patterns, Photoshop brushes, gradients, fonts, photos and more. COLOURlovers founder Darius “Bubs” Monsef says this is the chance to “go big with our mission, which is to make design simple and accessible.” Bubs wants to do for “mousemade goods” what Etsy has done for handmade goods, creating a peer-powered market for “casual creatives.”
But Creative Market will also be an extensible platform. It is built on an API other sites and applications can use to integrate the store into their own services. “We’re driving in-app purchases for creative content,” Bubs says. Tired of leaving Photoshop, going to the browser, Googling for something you need, buying it and wrestling to install it? The COLOURlovers Creative Market will let you browse, buy and install new elements without leaving your workspace.
COLOURlovers is all about giving so-called “casual creatives” better options than crappy clip art. It has been around for seven years, and Bubs says it’s “a million members strong.” Its core site lets people exchange color palettes and templates, and Creative Market expands the options to all kinds of digital design elements. It allows anyone who needs creative work done quickly to do the job, and it now offers a platform for digital designers to make some money.
The site has facilitated some transactions manually in the past, helping members sell patterns to MetLife and HarperCollins. Creative Market is a natural next step. “It will be super-easy for creators on COLOURlovers to get their content into the marketplace,” Bubs says, “and their marketplace content will be immediately buyable within the COLOURlovers site.”
Making the market available as a platform will extend its reach, but Bubs also views it as a win-win for other sites. “There’s a motivation to do it in a way that’s inclusive rather than exclusive,” Bubs says. “I’m optimistic that we can actually partner with a lot of other sites rather than compete with them.”
“Our plan is to build our marketplace on top of our own API so that it makes it really easy for other sites to plug into it.” Bubs says COLOURlovers has several such partners in mind, but they aren’t confirmed yet.
Creative Market is open for pre-registration by email today. If you sign up now, you’ll get a $5 credit. Creators who want to be listed among the first Creative Market publishers can contact the team at hello [AT] creativemarket.com.
Do consider yourself a “casual creative?” What kinds of mousemade design do you do? Share your experiences in the comments.