Friendly Competition

Last month, the Tinker’s Packs did an April Fool’s flash sale. If you missed it, that’s okay–they only advertised it on Twitter and Facebook. But to do so, Nicole asked if Brett could come up with a shareable image with a product code that she could post. Ideally, she wanted slightly different images she could post in the morning, midafternoon, and evening. Brett looked at her with horror, since he’s up to his ears in design work for the upcoming IndieGoGo campaign (we started extra early this year).

At the same time this was going on, Jenny was trying to soldier through a bunch of confusing video tutorials on Photoshop, with the idea that she’d be able to take over some of the work when Brett’s overloaded. So Brett decided to give Jenny a little real-world education: why not have a contest? Brett, Jenny, and Rachel would each start out with a different donkey image in a Twitter-friendly template and go from there. So Brett threw some jester hats on a few donkeys, wrote up the words Nicole needed on the graphics, and threw them all into a shared folder.

The next afternoon, everyone worked on their own image, and each one was shared throughout the day. Jenny learned a bunch of hands-on Photoshop stuff and got a lot more confident with it (take that, videos!), Rachel used her image to show Jenny some of the basics before Jenny had to sink or swim, and Brett took the opportunity to break from our normal book-centric design scheme. Here are the results!

Oh, the code doesn’t work anymore, but that’s okay–we’ll probably do this again in the future!

Here’s Brett’s. We’re thinking he was listening to too much lounge music at the time. Also, kinda crowded. We’re just saying.

This is Rachel’s. We really like the cool background, and this is apparently her favorite donkey drawing. Look at his little puppet!!

And here’s Jenny’s! We think she cheated a little, asking Brett to draw a scroll for her to use, but that sort of thing wasn’t forbidden in the Official Rules, so she got away with it. This is her first Photoshop creation. We’d say we were right to hire her!

Anyway, that’s how we keep things fresh around here: pit co-workers against each other in a knock-down, dragout, Photoshop duel-to-the-death!