BlenderNation

How to get your work featured on BlenderNation

Bart ·

BlenderNation features the Blender community’s top stories every day and you might wonder how you could get yours to be included.

The BlenderNation sourcing process is pretty straightforward: part of it is me looking over forums and social media. However, as BlenderNation is not my main job there will be days when I just don’t have the time to look around and find the best stories.

Therefore the best way to get your work noticed is submitting it directly to the site using my news submission pages. They’re pretty straightforward to use, but there are some guidelines to keep in mind to help you get your story accepted.

News Articles

You can find the main news submission page in the website navigation under ‘Contribute’.

There are two options on this form: one for sending a message (for example for inquiries or if there’s a problem on the website), and one for submitting news. The news submission form is more extensive and allows you to attach a graphic to your story etc. When you use this form, a new article is automatically created in WordPress, making the editing and publishing process a lot easier for me.

Here are some helpful tips to get your story on the site:

  • Think about your project. Do you think it’s the ‘Best of Blender’ or something that the community will be excited about? If it’s your first render or the result of following a tutorial, your changes of it getting accepted are slim. If you created stunning art, created a new high quality tutorial or coded some nifty new function, then you might just get selected :)
  • Don’t just post a link to your graphic, video or other project, but include a little background information. If this is your first article on BlenderNation tell us a bit about yourself. Add a short introduction about the project you’re publishing.
  • If you’d like to include multiple graphics, just add links to them to your text.
  • The header graphic will be auto-cropped to 728×336 pixels. If you’d like to have full control over which part is displayed, crop it yourself.
  • I can’t host video files, so please just include links to your work on YouTube or Vimeo.

After sending in your story, you will see a confirmation page and I’ll send you an automatic confirmation email. If you didn’t get these, your story wasn’t submitted properly. Just try again!

Note on crowdfunding campaigns:

I receive a LOT of PR for crowdfunding projects, and I have decided to feature only projects that:

  • Are made by people who have been active in the Blender community for some time and who have a good reputation.
  • Have something to show already, like a cool trailer.
  • Have a realistic financial goal.

Note on App Store or Google Play products:

I won’t feature your game here on BlenderNation only because you used Blender to create some assets – there really needs to be more to the story. For example, I’d be looking for truly high-quality game design, high profile games or a strong story about the production process.

Header Graphics

The other way to get featured is through a header graphic – they have their own dedicated submission form. I select a different one every day, and I’m looking for eye-catching ‘best of Blender’ images.

There are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Resolution! The images need to be 1078×310 pixels in size. Anything that’s not in the right resolution will be rejected immediately.
  • Please don’t add any credits or watermarks to your image, I’ll take care of proper crediting.
  • Remember that these images feature on every page on BlenderNation, so keep the file size under 400kb.

Community Events

If you have a meetup, workshop or other kind of event to share that’s relevant to the Blender community, you can put it on the Community Calendar. Use the ‘Submit a Community Event‘ page to share your story.

To use this page, you’ll have to be signed in. The added advantage of this is that you’ll be able to manage your events afterwards, keeping them updated as they approach.

Links

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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