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Twitter design contest à la problogger
Darren Rowse, the guy behind problogger has launched the last week a smart challenge in which he asked his readers to give some of their blogging tips in twitter style i.e. use only a maximum of 140 characters.
bq.While I wouldn’t want to write this way all of the time – it does make your pause before twittering something to think about what you want to communicate and how you can do it succinctly. ( Darren Rowse )
I loved the idea and alas (and of course) didn’t won :( The nice thing about this challenge is its constraint. In fact, creative things come out of very constrained environments. The least tools you have, the greatest effort you’ll have to provide. This is the rule of “minimalism”. We’ll discuss this philosophy in a later post, I promise, but now I’d like to present a similar challenge.
There are two main limits in twitter:
- The 140 characters limit (an sms length)
- The design
Twitter, despite its customization feature, gives a very restricted way to have a very personal page design:
In fact:
- You can’t change the background color of the area where messages and replays are displayed.
- You can’t change font families and sizes.
- You can’t change the layout.
- You can’t modify the HTML inside.
- You don’t have a real control of the CSS.
All you can do actually is change the sidebar background and border colors, the text color, links colors and the page’s background image. And this is darn frustrating for people wanting to customize their pages and have thier own “identity” on twitter.
That’s the analogy: Darren asked his readers to give the better blogging tips in only 140 characters and I’d like to ask you to show us your nice twitter page using what twitter offers!
The winner will have a nice and humble lil’ something in return! So go ahead and design your twitter page and show us your art!
Deadline: Friday 18th :)
P.S. You can see mine here: http://twitter.com/directeur . The background and the icon are pictures of John Coltrane ; the greatest jazz sax tenor… Well along with Sonny Rollins :)
You’re welcome to follow me. You’ll hear some jazz from me and other nice web goodies!
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