Sponge Project Blog ~ Web design in Tewkesbury

New superpowers flags. A set of flags that express more accurately the natures of the world’s existent, up-and-coming, and new superpowers.

Link via Quipsologies.

In the ongoing “Design contest debate” as I’m calling it, here’s a quick update on the contests entered so far (all via 99 designs):

1. Entered one that got withdrawn 4 days before it was due to finish! Was hours away from uploading my entry. Lesson learnt: tell them in the comments that you’re going to enter.
2. Entered another one and have got 3 stars (not good) but no feedback. Lesson learnt: ask for feedback.
3. Keep an eye on the contest’s status (healthy, caution or unhealthy) to see if the contest holder is really keeping an eye on things and providing the feedback needed.

I have a long watchlist of cool sounding contents that I intend to enter soon, so will keep you posted.

I’ve posted on the subject of design competitions before, which failed to reach a suitable conclusion for me, however I did stop entering them shortly afterwards.

But a recent article over at Sitepoint titled Design Contests Made Me A Better Designer has rekindled my interest somewhat. Basically the article is with Richard Scott, a designer who has been very successful with using design contests as his main income so understandably argues for them. The crux of the article is that the debate exists and will always exist because that’s life, but he sees it as a viable, if not slightly addictive, method of generating design work. If everyone agreed on everything all of the time life would be dull and grey.

So with that in mind I’m going to start a small experiment in my spare time and focus on one or two competitions to see what results I get. It’s not going to be overly scientific, but will give me a good indication of whether I think Richard’s success can be repeated (not suggesting I’m as good a designer as he is by the way).

I think Firefox is the best website browser ever and I’m not alone. Firefox is now so popular they are able to attempt an entry into the Guinness Book of Records for the most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours. This is pretty good stuff for a free, open source bit of kit!