Creative Synthesis

The collaborative has come into a little bit of money. To celebrate we’ll be holding a little contest to for the recycled canvas theme. This seems fairly timely considering the nice customizations and sites we have seen popping up.

The contest is pretty simple. The new version of the theme has two styles, light and dark. Both of these are very clean and simple. One is mostly white, and one is mostly black. They both use very few images or unnecessary details. They also both represent good starting points for some innovative design opportunities. A ‘tabla rasa’ if you will.

So to enter all you need to do is create a style that extends the theme and produces something usable, striking, innovative, clean, and (ideally) simple. Because this is an experiment this also represents the opportunity to see some cold hard data about your bright shiny design.

You also need to pay attention to the following requirements:

• You can only extend the theme (just like the light.css and dark.css do) you can’t alter the underlying structure. You can move things around a little if you can do it by extending the css, but you’ll lose points if you do anything -too- hacky (unless it is fantastic).
• You can use whatever images you want, as long as they are in the creative commons (i.e. licensed under one of the cc licenses - specifically only the by or by-sa license). This means that you can use existing images that are so licensed, or create your own so long as you license them this way.

The winner will receive the following:

• One (1) subscription to http://www.thepresentgroup.com/ , a mutual fund for art. (a $150 value)
• One (1) copy of the new Bill Moggridge book (a $40 value)
• One (1) copy of the Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda (a $20 value)
• One (1) copy of Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte (a $50 value)
• One (1) copy of 365: AIGA Year in Design 27, (a $20 value)
• Membership in the collaborative (value? no man can say)

All told (plus shipping) that’s a nearly $300 value - all for some time and creative energy.

One submission will be chosen, based on its rank in terms of 1) usability 2) aesthetics 3) innovation and 4) simplicity. This submission will be bundled with future releases of the theme. Other submissions will be offered for download on the site, separately (but not bundled) depending on their quality. The final day for submission will be June the 29th

Alternatively if (for some crazy reason) you don’t want any of these things, we’re happy to make a contribution to a charity of your choice in this amount.

To participate send a zip of the modified template, your name and your email address to hock [at] creativesynthesis.net

Once we start getting submissions we’ll be posting them to the demo site so everyone can check them out.