The Importance of Creating (your own) NFT Collections

I see a lot of artists posting on Twitter, minting their (pretty awesome) NFT artworks via marketplaces like Makersplace, Foundation etc. or minting ‘singles’ which get lost into the ocean of Rarible, Opensea general marketplace contracts. This is because, they’ve not minted them into their own Collections.

If you’re a serious artist or anyone with a project, you’re probably exploring something which deserves a title – and a Collection. You should therefore use Rarible or Opensea’s very useful Collection creation tools. These now include different blockchains, which is another option you can consider, if you wish to mint a lot for cheaper perhaps, or more items, or less rare items. It depends.

However, using these tools generally will keep your NFTs under a special ‘roof’ (this is better for mobile wallets too). Opensea collections (for Ethereum) are good because you can take your time to organise a complete collection of work, later putting up for sale and ‘freezing’ onto IPFS image and metadata. Before this point, the ‘lazy minting’ means if you make mistakes creating items they can still be deleted. You can even use an Unlockable feature, that could even be dynamic one to enable an artwork to change over time, etc…

The real strength of NFT Collections is that they make it easier to import work and sell on other platforms, eg. Rarible. And, once imported, in many cases you can create unique Collection profile pages for that particular marketplace too.

Other advantages: There may be options for collectors to bid on your entire collection, meaning you suddenly find that a few fans have purchased a load of your work at once.

Storefronts: You will find storefront tools (eg. Refinable) where you can import a number of NFT collections into one storefront. You might then choose to show or hide various items in those collections, for example to reserve some or keep them to yourself. You can also import collections from different blockchains.

Example: for Ade’s Press storefront on Refinable, I’ve imported one small collection (on Polygon) of nature photography called Organic Metaverse (3) at time of writing [I might add more]. This is effectively the same collection also available viewable via Rarible, Opensea and Matic.Art with its own page. Anyone buying one of these NFTs can do so across any website.

Considerations

You may lose some of the traffic that you can achieve with people browsing popular, dedicated art marketplaces for art collecting.

You’ll need to think about what features are available for storing metadata or image files long-term, eg. IPFS, Arweave.

It’s important to be serious about making a good Collection, with a common theme. It doesn’t have to be AI generated avatars!

Also, how the NFTs will be presented may not be as alluring on Opensea etc, which are not tailored to art collectors.

It’s also probably better to stick to the big marketplaces to create collections, like Opensea and Rarible, because you don’t want to be unable to mint or edit that collection when the contract creator is no longer there.

Another consideration is the creation of Collections themselves. It’s still early days, but your Polygon collection minted via Opensea may still only be unique there, and not viewable on Rarible. It may be viewable, but then you may not be able to sell the contract there.

Why? This may be that these Opensea collections are not true collections, with their own token that can be imported into other marketplaces. Rarible is actually better for creating truly unique contracts and collections. Marketplaces are caught between trying to retain unique NFT makers, and also be cross-platform and viewable. To have a personal collection though, you will need to make a unique contract on whatever blockchain.

Example again: Organic Metaverse 3 . This Polygon NFT Collection of nature photo-art was minted originally at Matic.Art marketplace onto the blockchain. It is also viewable in Rarible and Opensea where I made special collection page for it. However…. I can only sell items for MATIC on Matic.Art and Rarible marketplaces.

In my Opinion

Collections and the control (and artistic purpose) that come with them, have huge advantages and features for NFT makers.

These tools also remind NFT makers that an NFT can offer anything to followers or fans of something creative or inspiring, or even real-world based.

NFT collections can also showcase a lot of unique items, or a small number of items, with a lot of editions. You’ll need to plan carefully for your project and what it’s doing.

Another possibility is to showcase all your artwork/project on your own gallery website, and then link through to Rarible/Opensea where the NFTs are available, with unlockable high-res files.

The sky is still the limit, and platforms are evolving all the time.

Just remember that you’ll probably be happier retaining as much control as you can over you output, down the road!

July 2022

For more examples of collections, check out a few of my (mostly Opensea-native) projects, some still works in progress.

Personal artwork collection (mix of Polygon and Ethereum)
Organic Metaverse (Polygon)
Organic Metaverse (Ethereum)
Organic Metaverse 3 (Polygon) : created on Matic.Art but imported into Rarible
Ade’s Crypto Press (mix) : art inspired by crypto
Thoughtseeds (and Crimes) (Polygon)
Ade’s Press (writing and art) (Polygon)
Embertime orig. music outlines (Ethereum)
Avatars of Nature designs for avatars / animation (Ethereum)