A Castle Thank You

Kickstarter is a wonderful system of pairing artists and fans together to help finance the creation of art.

One desire of most artists is to thank the people who supported them as they pursued creating something great. Sometimes the artist even wants to personally thank every person by name, but how do you do this in an effective way when you have 21,207+ backers?

The game studio behind Castle Story has announced their solution in this video:

This got me thinking about other styles of art.

Musicians could write a song with just the names of the backers …. or lots of songs …
Graphic Artists could use the names as building blocks for an image.

If you are creating any products, names could be incorporated in the naming of the products.

One more lesson from Castle Story, you can indicate your desire to credit backers, but you also want to leave yourself (as the artist) some flexibility. Don’t handcuff yourself to one particular way of crediting people before you know how many you need to credit. If you are inventing miniatures, expecting 50 people to back your campaign & suddenly you have 3,000 people … well, that causes you to have to make a whole lot of additional miniatures.

You don’t want to have success cause failure, so leave yourself options. You can even not mention the “thank you” in your initial campaign, then with seven days left you announce it. That’s what the guys with Castle Story did.

Being creative & using your craft to thank people can be very meaningful for people who already like the art you make.