pixiv

About

pixiv (site domain: www.pixiv.net^[1]) is a popular social network for illustrators in Japan, a sort of equivalent of deviantART in the English web.

History

pixiv was launched by the Japanese programmer Takahiro Kamitani who hit upon the idea by Flickr on September 10th, 2007 as a beta test. The website went under a renewal on December 18th, 2007 into basically what is offered now.

pixiv has support for multiple languages including Japanese, Chinese, English, Korean, Russian, French and Thai.

As of January 28th, 2012, the site consists of over 4 million members, over 24 million submissions, and receives over 2.8 billion page views monthly.^[2]

Features

High Affinity with Doujin

Many Doujin circles register the accounts and post promoting illustrations for their books released in Doujin market. Thus, trend in pixiv is much affected by that of Doujin market. For exapmle, Touhou Project fan art account for 5.8% of all illustrations.

pixiv Encyclopedia

pixiv Encyclopedia is an internet encyclopedia section in pixiv.^[3] It has been enhanced to offer information of many memes/fads relevant to illustrations.

Project

In pixiv, Project (企画, Kikaku) means user-generated events of posting illustrations in the same themes proposed by inventors. To run projects, a common tag “Project Catalog” (企画目録) is used for presentation, and the special page for the catalogs is prepared by the official.^[4] A few projects represented by Pixiv Fantasia are really grandiose, but most of them are user-generated casual events which just utilize template images and the illustration response feature as described next.

Illustration Response

Illustration Response (Japanese: イメージレスポンス) is a sort of trackback feature in weblog tools. It was implemented on September 15th, 2008 for the purpose of encouraging more smooth collaborations among users. However, users have usually used this feature not for sending completed illustrations as response, but for publishing exploitable templates to enjoy drawing together in specific themes. On pixiv, those are called “Illustration Response Project” (イメレス企画, Imeresu Kikaku). Expression Practice and Bottle Meme are famous successful illustration response projects.

Related Memes

For the complete listing of memes that pixiv is contributed, check out KYM Collection – pixiv.

Search Interest

External References