Best recent contests

Bringing the catchup to a close, here are some contest entries that have done quite well (by my standards).

For the theme "calligraphy," which also had to be in black and white, I focused on ligatures - joined-together letters. I thought it would be fun to put them in circles, to focus on the shapes rather than making it look like something you should be reading.



This got 149 votes and came in 26th out of 205! My favorites were the textured assortment of pens and ink (which won), the friendly speech bubbles, and the bold sampler.

For the yearly tea towel calendar, I did an assortment of ephemera - menus, tickets, etc, each of which had one month's worth of numbers on it.



The background is the "kitchen table" I created previously. This got 186 votes, almost made it into the top 20% of entries, and I even sold a few. The ones I liked best were the tall ship and the trees.

Finally, near the end of October, there was a contest to do something related to Calaveras, a.k.a. sugar skulls. I pondered what kind of shape or creature to apply that decoration style to, and since there are so many oak trees around here, settled on acorns. Also, the Synergy project has a "haunted" color group, so I used that to tie it into Halloween more specifically.



I had a lot of fun with this one and I'm quite happy with how it came out. It got 42 "likes" (second only to Baby's Book of Computer Science), 198 votes, and came in 29th out of 250. My favorite (other than my own!) was this one.

The most recent contest was a good one for me as well. The theme was "spoons," this being Spoonflower and all. I tried to think of something other than "cutesy layout of spoons in nice colors," since that would be what most people would do. I tried to think of some other theme to apply to spoons - Disney princesses as spoons? The seven deadly sins as spoons? Eventually I settled on putting a piece of advice on each spoon, and calling it "spoon-fed wisdom."



The colors are from this menswear palette. The advice is:

• Don't drown in a cup of water
• The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place (George Bernard Shaw)
• Not my circus, not my monkeys
• It's ok to have an unexpressed thought
• If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself (Albert Einstein)
• Worrying won't stop bad stuff from happening, it just stops you from enjoying the good

This came in 25th, ending up in the 91st percentile - the best relative finish I've had so far! Can't complain about that. My favorite was probably this one, which included a bunch of other kitchen implements.