For Artists Archives | Foundation Web Design & Development

I looked at 200+ artist portfolios. Here’s what I learned

April 14, 2026April 15, 2026

As some of you may know, I recently started up HireHumanArtists.com, a directory spreadsheet of artists who have pledged to never use gen AI while creating their works. This comes with a small caveat: someone has to review all of the submissions to see if any immediately identifiable gen AI is present in the artist portfolios. Thankfully, I have help. There’s a small group of us going through the “slush pile” of artist portfolios submitted. Still, to keep confidence in artists on the list high, we ask for a voting consensus of four people to approve each applicant at the least. Currently, there are 344 artists on the list (and growing). I’ve looked at the vast majority of the portfolios sent in, and I thought I’d note what I’ve learned, what I’ve seen, and what you may want to take away from all of these portfolios I saw.

Accessible Marketing: Avoiding Mystery Meat in your Marketing Efforts

A loaf of questionable meat product cut into slices laid on a plate.

February 10, 2025December 9, 2025

You may be familiar with the concept of “mystery meat”: A “meat” product, usually some sort of salisbury steak or meatloaf type deal, usually served in American cafeterias. People usually don’t really know what’s inside this meal: they know it’s some sort of meat, but they can’t pinpoint what exactly just by looking at it. I’ve been referring to vague navigational beacons as “mystery meat navigation” for many years, thanks to a coining from an ancient website I believe was YourWebsiteSucks.com (I can’t seem to unearth it now; it could have been WebpagesThatSuck.com but I was pretty sure at the time it was more pointed than that). The same concept can be used to describe nebulous marketing concepts.

So, what is a piece of mystery meat in the marketing sphere, and how do we avoid it?

Keeping Your Artwork Safe: Watermarking 101

January 2, 2024November 10, 2023

In the age of the digital world, everyone thinks they can just grab any image they want off of Google image search and use it for any purpose they want. While actually protecting your copyright as an artist is a different topic entirely, we talk about how to do your best to ensure attribution is given to you when you’re not there to babysit your artwork.

How to edit your Shopify robots.txt file to block AI Crawlers

November 24, 2023November 24, 2023

So… You want to add some of the information to block AI crawlers from continually scraping your data. Easy enough with a WordPress plugin, and Squarespace has a toggle, but what about Shopify?

The help center document on their robots.txt file seems very daunting. Especially with that big ol warning about losing all of your traffic. But I assure you, it’s actually very easy to do, and very easy to revert if you’ve done it incorrectly.

Which web crawlers are associated with AI crawlers?

November 17, 2023October 1, 2025

While initially building out my Simple NoAI & NoImageAI plugin for WordPress, a meta directive was all we had at the time. Now that crawlers are using robots.txt to determine whether a site has opted in for web crawling, more well-behaved crawlers are looking for them. Therefor, it’s important to have a list of crawlers, what they’re noted to be used for, and their user agents in case you want to block them.

This information as of Oct 1st, 2025 is up to date, but may change. I will try to keep this list updated as much as I can. Information on this list is also supplemented by Cloudflare’s list of blockable AI crawlers.

Should I have an artist portfolio website?

November 10, 2023November 21, 2023

Short answer: yes!

While it seems like it might be the easiest solution for you to just have a Facebook or Instagram account, as an artist it is important for you to have a platform for yourself. Specifically, it’s important for you to have a platform where you are in control of the content that’s on it. Facebook and Instagram are great places to help you build an audience, but do you really want to show off your Facebook page to a potential client or Art Director? We go into the reasons you should have an artist portfolio website so you can make a best decision for your artistic career.

Utilizing Robots.txt to Block AI Crawlers

August 8, 2023November 24, 2023

Here I am, back again to pass along some knowledge on how to protect you and your art against generative AI. In fact, I’ve got a few posts happening now, and I’m sure more will come as the technology evolves, so I’m going to start a new category for blog posts under “protecting your art“. You can always subscribe to get blog updates from me if you’re interested in hearing more about these things as they emerge.

Today I’m going to teach you a little bit about the inner workings of web crawlers and how to utilize a robots.txt file to block certain crawlers from accessing your website.

What is DeviantArt’s new “noai” and “noimageai” meta tag and how to install it

November 12, 2022November 24, 2023

Yesterday, the internet was taken by storm by DeviantArt’s announcement of some new services and features. Many people focused on the fact that DeviantArt announced an AI generator of their own, and that by default, images uploaded to DeviantArt were opted in to being allowed to be used for AI training (though not specifically DeviantArt’s AI called “DreamUp”). DeviantArt has since reversed its stance on opt in (now making opt out the default, which should have been the case to begin with), but there were a lot of different, loosely related ideas that were part of this announcement that, unfortunately, were missed. One of these is the release of the “noai” and “noimageai” meta tags, which will help you have more control over whether or not your art is used to train AI image generators.