“The computer is great, but it’s become a crutch for creative people,” he said. “My computer makes me more efficient … but that said, it’s just a tool. What designers need to do more today than ever before is bring a balance between analog and their digital skills. Because the methods that worked in the past can only benefit and enhance your work going forward.”

As a doodler and casual artist myself, I’m a huge fan of iPad apps like Paper that let you turn your tablet into a digital drawing and painting device. Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, per say, you’re probably familiar with apps like Draw Something.

But Glitschka went back as far as cave drawings and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to remind us that sometimes, digital isn’t always better, and drawing with paint and pencils can kickstart the creative process when computers fall short. In fact, some of our most popular logos and ads these days come from drawing methods popularized much earlier, such as Picasso’s use of line drawings that we now see in ads all over the place:

Photo by designer Von Glitschka

“There’s a common misconception that doodling shows that you’re not paying attention,” he said, but “doodling improves your brain recall by 30 percent.”

It’s too easy for design students to get caught up in computer programs when drawing is still an essential skill, he said, but drawing can open doors for journalists like Mathew Cook who brought the Iraq War to life through pen and paper, or art students who forget that as designer Saul Bass said, “design is thinking made visual.”

Bass designed iconic American images like the AT&T bell logo, the United Airlines tulip logo, or the racing credits in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. But even if most of us know Bass’s work from the television or computer screens, he reminded designers not to forget the art of drawing on paper:

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The initiative is somewhat similar to the BBC’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” a very popular 2010 project that explored 100 objects in the British Museum in 15-minute episodes.

“82nd & Fifth is a project that speaks directly to my interest in using the Met’s collection to link historical art and culture to the real world,” Met CEO and director Thomas Campbell said in a statement. “In a sea of constant information, these two-minute, authoritative commentaries are a welcome way to get powerful and compelling content in quick doses.” The objects can be sorted on a timeline or viewed by location in Google Earth.

Each episode features a curator talking over a series of photographs, and then an interactive feature that lets viewers explore the work of art up close (rotating Antonio Rossellino’s “Madonna and Child with Angels,” for instance, or clicking through blueprints for Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Little House Living Room”).

The site is built using responsive design so that it works across devices, and there are some very basic features for sharing the episodes on social media. The Met notes this is its third major online initiative: “The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, launched in 2000, continues to evolve and expand, and receives more than one million visits per month. Connections (2011) offers personal perspectives on works of art from the collection by 100 Met staff members.”

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Foldify was created by Warsaw, Poland-based Pixle, a trio of two designers and an engineer. The app is for the iPad only right now, and it will cost $1.99 on launch, but will be priced higher later. The concept is pretty basic: use the iPad to create digital papercraft art that can be broadly customized with colors, facial features, designs and more, and then quickly printed out, cut and folded to make paper creatures or objects.

Finished Foldify art

It’s very simple, but Pixle is not targeting kids — though they are going to be adding blank outlines that can be printed for young children to color them in with crayons or pencils. They want it to be for “everyone,” said Krzysztof Zabłocki, Pixle’s engineer. “I think we kind of made it that way — it’s easy to use but you don’t need drawing skills.”

The iPad is an unexpected platform for making things with paper, but Zabłocki says it’s actually the ideal kind of way to create something.

“The problem with creating content on the iPad is it’s not as good as your PC for most usages, like for productivity and stuff like that, I still find my Mac more useful,” he said. “But for something really creative, with a bit of fun, I prefer to be able to zoom in, zoom out, move some stuff. It really feels more natural. We tried to prove that quite a bit with Foldify.”

It’s natural because your finger is always your brush — there’s no complicated set of tools to select from. Instead of picking a brush size, you simply zoom in or out for more level of detail. Using just your finger to create something is much more immediate and engaging than a tool or utensil — it’s likely why kids take so quickly to touchscreen tablets. And that is what I think makes this app so wonderful and accessible. I would not pick up a papercraft kit at my local art store. But did I download the app on a whim while sitting on my couch? Yep. And to confirm Zablocki’s claim, it is very simple to use. There’s a menu of colors, patterns, facial features and accessories, as well as a color wheel with which you can decorate your object.

Foldify is the second app from Pixle, which is made up of Zablocki, and Mariusz Ostrowski and Renata Ostrowska, a husband and wife team of user interface and user experience designers. They strive for very simple, easy to use mobile apps. ”We really wanted to create something fresh. We saw papercraft and said that would be a great idea,” Zablocki said. “No one ever did that on mobile before.”

But it’s a decent bet that as the idea of 3D printers and the maker movement continue to catch on, coupled with simpler, cheaper examples of using tech to make art like Folidfy, more developers and artists will be encouraged to further explore how physical art can come from the devices we use every day.

Updated to note that the app’s introductory price will be $1.99.

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While Excelerate focuses on Chicago-based startups ,this particular class had a much broader background with entrepreneurs temporarily relocating to the Windy City from as far away from India and France. The graduates also spanned every corner of the technology map, from new e-commerce platforms and photo aggregation services to a company trying to teach computers to see as humans. While all 10 companies made an impression, here are the ones that grabbed my attention in particular:

Orbeus

It may seem like another Face.com competitor, Orbeus but it’s taking its image recognition software to another level, identifying context as well as people in digital photographs. Founded by a handful of MIT and Boston University scientists, Orbeus seeks to identify anything and everything in a photo or video from where it was shot to items within it.

“Computers can read like humans, but they can’t see like humans,” Orbeus CEO and co-founder Xing Meng said during his presentations. “We help computers see better than humans.”

So rather than just match names to faces, Orbeus can mine images for all kinds of information. By identifying the dishes in the Foodspotting pictures you take, it can tell that you’re a vegetarian and tell social networks to stop serving you up ads for steakhouses. It can identify how many times a particular logo shows up in the video frame of a sporting, helping marketers with strategic brand placement. It can determine from your Flickr photostream whether you like to vacation on sandy beaches or in Vegas casinos.

Technology like this raises some big privacy concerns, as my colleague Derrick Harris has pointed out, but it can also turn digital images from random collections of pixels into data just as meaningful to machines as they are to people.

Lasso

This startup is delving into the crowded field of social planning and meet-up apps, populated by Facebook Events, Plancast, Saambaa and Giddyup, just to name a few. But Lasso co-founder Wes Dearborn said most of those apps are two rigid in structure. Lasso’s iPhone app switches the focus away from the event, location or time to the people itself.

Dearborn said the social planning tool millennials most commonly use to plan social outings is plain-old SMS, spawning massive chains of text messages. Lasso is building off the texting trend. Its app allows user to reach out to all or a select number of friends with a suggestion for an activity or gathering, something as simple as “let’s hang out on Friday.”

At any time, friends can suggest a specific time, location or activity using in-app planning tools, but those plans are subject to change at anytime depending on which way your circle is leaning. Rather than create an event-planning app, Lasso has created an app that facilitates casual social activities between friends, making logistics secondary.

Cureeo

Wine used to be the purview of the stuffy elite and viticulturally knowledgeable, but in the last 20 years it’s become accessible to the mass market. Cureeo wants to bring about that same transformation in the art world by combining an online gallery for selling art with an informational portal that translates the esoteric terminology of galleries into layman’s terms.

While the market for $2,000 artworks may never scale down to the consumer masses, the vast majority of people with the means and inclination to collect don’t have the background or training to make purchasing decisions, Cureeo CEO Maida Swenson-Fortune said. “The general public feels that unless they have a friend in the industry they’ll be duped,” she said.

Cureeo isn’t just the wine industry as an example, it’s following the playbook of wine critic Robert Parker, who in his newsletter The Wine Advocate began using a 50-100 point scale to rate bottles of wine. Cureeo is developing a methodology that will assign ratings to its wares determined by how the market’s current valuation of the artist’s work and experts’ views on that value’s potential for appreciation.

Those scores will then been compared against the price of every painting, sculpture and photo sold on Cureeo’s website, generating a 50-100 point rating aimed at helping collectors get the most value from their investment. That may seem like it punishes the artists trying to maximize their sales on Cureeo’s site, but co-founder and head curator Stephanie Coate said the methodology would also benefit artists who often have no idea how to price their work.

Pictarine

Pictarine CEO Guillaume Martin was definitely the most entertaining presenter at Excelerate at the expense of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Martin’s premise was a simple one: Photos have become the currency of social media, expressing much more personality and depth of meaning than status updates or “likes” ever could. The problem is there is no single source from which we can view all of the photos you and your friends collect.

As the uber-social network, Facebook is aggregating photos from multiple photo networks such as Instagram, Flickr and even directly from your mobile phone, but it’s fallen flat in presenting those photos, opting instead for news feed clutter, Martin said. To put his way: “Mark is between your friends and you.”

Pictarine’s app – which the startup surprisingly chose to build for Android before the iPhone – is as simple as the company’s premise. It creates a meta-social network aggregating your friends’ photo streams from Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.

Whimseybox

Forget wine clubs and farm shares, Whimseybox is delivering a monthly craft box to its subscribers for $25 a month, which they can use to make their own DIY creations. According to CEO and founder Alicia DiRago, crafting has become a $30 billion industry, but the primary supplier of craft supplies, Michael’s, doesn’t even have an e-commerce presence.

Whimseybox plans to fill that gap by creating an online community that will not only provide ideas and inspiration for the growing number of do-it-yourself crafters, but also sell the materials necessary to bring those ideas to life.

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The iPhone app, released on Tuesday, looks good, but the improvements aren’t just about getting a new lick of paint. Founder and CEO Raphaëlle Heaf told me that the new ArtSpotter was adding a range of extra services that moved it on significantly from the previous version.

That early app let people tag art they’d found and liked, which in turn allowed other people to search for interesting art near them. Now, however, Artspotter is really trying to help people engage with art by helping people recommend, document and comment on the exhibitions, venues and street work that they find.

To do that it draws on some very familiar social features, like activity streams, but also seems like a much smarter and more engaging app than the company’s first, tentative effort.

“This is our first proper app,” Heaf, who has worked in and around the art world for the past 15 years, told me. “The first was really an aggregator for event listings that anyone could add to, but this new one is more about activity — it’s not about discovering what is around you, although you can do that too, but making it more social.”

But Heaf insisted that a big difference between her service and others, broader services was that it was focused on connecting the physical world with the digital one. ArtSpotter is not about sharing pictures of art, she said; it’s about going to experience the art in a gallery, museum, or on a wall.

“Our vision is about getting more people to see more art in real life. It’s not about sharing photos of art, it’s about a platform where all the dynamics of the art world are connected and can be shared,” she told me. “At the moment people share their photos of street art on Instagram and people say ‘wow, that’s cool’ — but they’re not geo-located, so you can’t find where they are, you don’t know who the artist is and so on.”

In a way, you can imagine ArtSpotter as a Path for a very specific niche. Or perhaps it’s not that specific really: last Spencer Hyman, the founder of another London art startup, Artfinder, told me that the art market was valued at $50 billion annually.

But that’s where competition comes in. Artfinder, too, is about discovering works — as are several other outfits currently doing the rounds. What makes ArtSpotter different?

Heaf says it’s not focused on the commercial end of the market: getting people to find and purchase artworks. The longer-term play for her service is to do something that’s parallel: to get data about what people like and want with art, what they’re doing right now and then sell that data on to venues and art sellers.

Right now she says the focus is on getting users through the door before putting the next part of the plan into action.

“A lot of the other apps are very commerce-based; it’s discovery so you can buy a piece. We work in a complementary fashion — you’re out and about and looking at pieces, and we can recommend things to look at. Our focus isn’t on revenue, but eventually we want to be the Google Analytics for venues. We can do real-time customer awareness analytics… this is just our first step.”

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With its expansion into prints, Minted aims to compete with art sites like 20×200, which sells limited-edition prints at low prices online. At 20×200, for example, most 11×14 prints are $60. Minted is selling prints at fixed price ranges depending on size; 11×14 prints, for instance, range from $55 to $120.

In addition to the 350 art prints for sale so far, Minted is selling customizable prints like family trees, maps and “wedding celebration art.”  ”Consumers have been looking for a personal connection to art for a long time,” said Minted founder and CEO Mariam Naficy in a statement. “Our customizable art not only epitomizes indie chic, but allows the consumer to make it their own by choosing colors and text personal to them and their particular space.”

All of the new art prints are also available in “several colorways, in order to allow customers to match art prints to their home décor.”

New Pinterest-like feature, “My Boards,” lets users “curate and share” their favorite designs

With Minted’s new “My Boards,” users can put together their own collections of stationery and art so that they can, for example, compare multiple wedding invitation designs at once. They can also share those boards to Pinterest.

Minted has raised $8 million in funding so far, including a $5.5 million Series B round in 2011. Investors include Benchmark Capital, Menlo, IDG, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Yelp cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman.

Art featured in this post: “Longing for Sutro” by Wilko Design, “Wordsworth” by ERAY

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The London-based company has quietly closed a fresh injection of funding from Scandinavian VC Northzone, UK/German venture firm Wellington and Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners — all with an eye to helping build out its online catalog of paintings from artists, galleries and museums all over the world.

The company is remaining tight-lipped on the deal, and the terms are not being disclosed, but I’ve confirmed that the round took place at the end of last year.

The company, which started in 2010, is sometimes described as a “Last.fm for art” — in no small part because of CEO Spencer Hyman’s previous job running the popular online radio service.

But it’s also because, at its heart, Artfinder is a service for discovering and sharing creative work.

As I described in an interview with Hyman last summer, its gamble is that there is enough money in the art market that it can provide a valuable, profitable service to the millions of people who visit museums and galleries each week. It hopes to become the IMDB — or even the Amazon — of art, providing a home for art, and perhaps selling art, on the Web.

To do this, it has developed a smart visual search thats allows it to identify paintings using an iPhone app, while users can use the website to find works they like or share their tastes with others. They’re also able to browse specific collections using one of the bespoke iPad apps that the company has developed in partnership with the likes of London’s Royal Academy.

Those have been doing pretty well — the Quentin Blake catalog for the Foundling Museum is one that did particularly well — and it’s also been expanding its footprint on social networks with an app that integrates the artworks you look at into your Facebook Timeline:

The move represents a follow-on investment for both Wellington and Greylock, who participated in the company’s first round back last year, which brought LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and London angel Sherry Coutu into the fold. Northzone’s Lea Bajc has joined the board as a result, and the involvement of her company — probably best known for its stake in super hot music service Spotify — gives Artfinder some extra punch.

It’s not alone in this market — there is competition of varying kinds, both from smaller upstarts like ArtSpotter and major names like Google, which has its own Art Project.

But this fresh funding should enable Artfinder to stay ahead of the pack, and I’m told that it plans to do that by revamping its offering to drive up engagement and usage.

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The legal spat ensued after the BVG transit authority sent cease-and-desist letters to both the filmmakers and their distributor, arguing that they should have obtained filming permits for footage shot at train stations and on other premises owned by BVG. The filmmakers responded by saying that they didn’t actually shoot any of the numerous clips that show how masked graffiti artists rush onto platforms, sneak through underground tunnels and climb over high-voltage electric third rails. Instead, all of the footage was submitted to them by the more than two dozen crews responsible for the graffiti shown in the movie.

The filmmakers contextualized this raw footage with a number of interviews both with graffiti artists as well as law enforcement officials who pursue them — and the interviews openly touch on subjects like fatal accidents as well as legal actions taken against people who get caught. “You get to know each other,” comments one masked artist about the relationship between the scene and police officers.

Of course, one can have differing opinions about graffiti, especially when it’s applied to third-party property — and I realize that even me using the term artist in this context may open me up to criticism.

However, to me, the bigger issue is that BVG is trying to fight windmills: With digital cameras being readily available to graffiti crews, there’s no way to prevent footage of trains getting repurposed as moving canvases popping up on YouTube and similar sites. In fact, this has been going on for years. Now to turn against filmmakers who put all of this into context — and include dissenting voices — is more than questionable.

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Hyman takes his inspiration from one obvious source: his previous job as chief operating officer at music recommendation site Last.fm. He helped guide the site through its $240 million acquisition by CBS in 2007 and now wants Artfinder to build a similar service for a different purpose.

“If you want to build one of these great businesses like Last.fm, or IMDB or LinkedIn, you need to get four bits of a virtuous circle working. The first is the catalogue. Once you’ve got the catalogue, you can move on to the next bit, social profiles — curating stuff, building their own collections, meeting people with similar tastes, sharing stuff. If you think about that, it’s never happened to art. If wanted to show me your 10 favorite pictures in the National Gallery, how would you do it? If you wanted to tell me about this great new street artist called Inky, how would you do it?”

“Then the next bit is discovery. It’s the search, it’s the recommendation.” The final piece, he says, is online consumption — providing an alternative to the postcard.

In truth, though, this is the sort of social pitch that has been applied to dozens of sectors, with wildly varying degrees of success. But Hyman says the art market is a sleeping giant just waiting for the moment it can really benefit from being digital. For a start, it’s a huge industry that draws in large audiences. There are varying estimates of the size of the market, which includes auctions and private sales, but even the lowball numbers start at a worldwide value of $50 billion annually. It’s a largely untapped market.

And then there’s an opportunity in what he calls “the Ikea situation”: most people buy their art from home stores like Ikea. Why can’t somebody take a piece of that?

It’s an argument worth putting forward, and the team is polished and well-connected enough to have pushed the idea successfully to a handful of backers: angel investment from the likes of LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and a first round earlier this year from Wellington Partners. On top of that, he has assembled a team of co-founders, most of whom he worked with before, to get the job done.

My takeaway from meeting them was that the way they’re hoping to crack the market is with a three-pronged approach.

• Build a catalogue that really covers the vast majority of art and artists available in the world. Today, Artfinder has details of around 500,000 works — but in the end, to be useful, it will require between 2 million and 10 million works. To get there, it’s partnering with institutions across the U.S., Britain and elsewhere.
• Build image recognition software that allows to be what they call “a Shazam for art”. The system is already working, essentially boiling down a user photograph into a digital fingerprint that can be compared against the database. Making this system infallible and fast is a crucial part of the job.
• Build apps that give users something to do, and a place to do it. I suspect that, in the end, most of Artfinder’s usage may be in galleries and museums rather than on the website. To this end, the company is offering museums and galleries and even individual artists a set of tools that allow them to rapidly build a downloadable catalogue or show guide for visitors to use.

If they can do all this, then Artfinder may be on to something. The proposition will be a lot more straightforward: Find a piece of art you like, whether it’s in a museum, gallery or out on the street, and take a photo of it. The system examines the photo, breaks it down and works out what you’re looking at. From there, the apps can do all manner of things: let you find out more about the artist, see more work by the artist or — crucially — give you the option to buy a print, a book, a postcard right away.

Still, I can’t help but have a couple of reservations.

First, there’s the question of whether there are enough art aficionados to provide the core user base. Art is a difficult sell to the vast majority of people because — even though we are surrounded by art and design all day, every day — it’s largely seen as an elite pursuit. True, the Ikea opportunity could be large, but the fact that it even exists could be because people just don’t care enough about art to worry about making informed decisions. Is the overlap between the hardcore art community and the natural user base for a digital service large enough? A venture-backed business requires dramatic scale.

In addition, most art is about consumption, not creation — yet most successful sharing platforms are based, largely, around things users have created themselves, whether it’s posting your photos to Flickr or writing a witty message on Twitter or ranting on Facebook. Professional work can be a hugely important part of the mix, and it is often where the money lies… but only a tiny minority of us will ever be considered artists by other people.

And even in terms of consumption alone, there’s another problem: The art experience relies on physical presence. There are many recommendation engines out there to let us share our tastes and get us to consume more of the things we like, whether it’s Amazon tips or Netflix recommendations or music services like Last.fm. But most of them rely on media that can be distributed digitally. Nobody has yet produced a good, Kindle-like experience for art, or created the MP3 of sculpture — and for art lovers, merely looking at an image on their screen is a pale imitation.

Are these barriers too much to deal with? They could be awkward, but I’m not sure they are insurmountable. After all, if the last few years of media upheaval have shown anything, it’s that for every problem there is somebody, somewhere, who will crack it.

“If you think of something like music, it doesn’t really lend itself to the PC,” says Hyman. “But if you look at what the PC [has] done to music, it’s completely revolutionized it —it’s completely changed it, both from making, as an artist, as a musician, but also from your ability to find music, to be able to listen to it, to be able to share it. The weird thing is that’s never happened in the world of art: Art hasn’t got digitized. We’re trying to figure out why that hasn’t happened.”

And if they can be the ones to do it, then the team at Artfinder may very well be one to watch.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Joi Ito

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The iPads start with video and music synced wirelessly on all devices, with each individual tablet displaying one part of the greater picture. Audience members are then invited to interact with the display. They can change the playback speed of both audio and video on each iPad, and also adjust screen brightness and choose what melody is being played. The experience essentially puts individual audience members in the role of DJ.

As people interact with the installation, video and audio get out of sync. The challenge is then to try to work together to get it back to its original state, just like how humans have to work together to try to negate some of our effect on the environment. Of course, the iPad itself uses some pretty toxic materials in its construction, isn’t user upgradeable, and can’t be recycled locally, and the project uses 25 of them, but who’s counting?

iProject25 was created by Taq, a composer who worked with Konami on the game BeatMania and his friend Simon Mayer, who heads a German design firm. Programmer Mui Iwase handled the iOS coding of the app used on the iPads. It’s a great example of the iPad being used for artistic purposes, but its creators believe it also demonstrates another way businesses might take advantage of Apple’s tablet for promotional efforts. What do you think? Wouldn’t you want to play with a giant wall of iPads if you ran into one in your local mall, for instance?

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