redditors doodle: honorable mentions

We got a lot of great submissions from my offer to doodle the reddit logo. In a very un-reddit fashion, the 4 of us on team reddit voted on the five DIY logos we'd put online (although we did use an internal reddit poll to do it).

I've been meaning to put the honorable mentions online -- drankkit just kept getting in the way. Sorry it took so long. Here they are:

Geoffrey Aladro -- plugging donorschoose.org

Zach Wentz -- plugging 111unite.us

Lanfearinc & FroggyX plugging itsachat.com

Thanks again to all of you who participated.

where's reddit?

This gem was submitted in a comment about my plea to rescue our reddit alien.See if you can spot the alien. Heh. Classy, urabsurd, really classy ;-)

zombie sneak attack!

With Halloween approaching, this late submission to the "redditors draw the alien week" just had to get some love. Zombie love.

It even came with a great email:

I noticed the little alien one day on my brother's blue powder t-shirt. He were always wearing it and I never really knew what it was until a few days ago. My brother sent me a link to this website. I think he's one of your daily readers and he knows I love to draw and create stuff.

Then I picked my pencils and drew up a Zombified Little Reddit Alien.
Why zombified???? I don't really know! I just love to draw that kind of gore thing heheheh

Just take a look over here: http://felix.laflamme.org

Oh also, me and my brother who's always wearing that weird blue powder shirt... we got a project together. It's called Skin Circus and we provide free MySpace Layouts based on Various Artists Artworks.

http://www.skincircus.com

There's some pretty cool, albeit twisted, stuff on his site, so check it out if you're short on Halloween inspiration. Felix LaFlamme is a 27 year-old from Quebec, which would have French-speaking zombies. Canadian zombies, armed with Tim Horton's coffee and hockey sticks, would be quite a menace, eh.Thanks Felix, I'll be looking for you when the zombies finally attack.

redditors doodle: friday

Well, I let redditors doodle the logo for this entire week and still no pink slip. I'd call that a success. Our final submission of the week was actually the first we received (bonus points for pro-activeness) -- from R Stevens. No first name, very mysterious. But who can complain about someone who submits a pixel-art logo?

R was going to plug XKCD, but figured it would be frivolous considering everyone reading this blog (and reddit) would already have Randall Munroe altars in their bedrooms. I know I do. So instead...

I draw DS every day and Red Robot shows up a lot: http://www.dieselsweeties.com/

Exploding Dog's the guy I share Red with: http://www.explodingdog.com/

Scary Go Round uses Red sometimes to great effect: http://www.scarygoround.com

...and Octopus Pie is pretty much the best new comic of 2007: http://www.octopuspie.com/

Quite the webcomic grouphug.

And did I mention that he sells shirts like this?

Be careful, R, once we start breeding with the robots, they're going to become even less discernible from humans. We don't want that kind of a future. At least we know what they dream of -- that means we can destroy them.

But in the meantime, a little harmless (read: safe) fun with a robot can't be too dangerous, right? I thus have no choice but to endorse your t-shirt.

And with that, Do-It-Yourself reddit alien week has ended and we (me in particular) would like to thank all of you who submitted. You've done wonders for my workload ;-)

The five of you who were selected will be receiving an email from me with instructions on how to receive your obligatory complimentary reddit shirt.

redditors doodle: thursday

I was really hesitant to post this. Marc Yelloz submitted this on Tuesday, after we'd vetted the first batch of logos and I plugged them into a private reddit poll to let the rest of the team vote them up/down.

I should have never told Marc how impressed we were, because he proceeded to send a few more. They were all lovely, but the problem is that each one puts me one step closer to being out of a job. So at great professional risk to myself, I decided to upload his first submission for today's redditor doodle (and will put his other two submissions online this weekend).

He didn't have a site to plug, but that's OK; I'll use this opportunity to thank "repptide: The Tide of Opinion" for advertising on redditAll.com -- thanks! But all the props in this entry really should go to Marc for his swell doodles.

Confession: This movie scared the hell out of me the first time I saw it. And the next six times. To this day I refuse to use white plastic trash bags because they remind of when that task force came to take away E.T.

Bastards.Conversely, I suddenly have a craving for Reese's Pieces...

(I wonder how much they spent for that product placement.)

redditors doodle: wednesday

Until yesterday*, this one was team reddit's favorite, so putting it here in the middle of the week seemed like the highest honor (traffic usually peaks for the week around Wednesday).

ElbridgeGerry creatively doodled this endearing chalkboard alien. Appropriately, Elbridge wanted to support his favorite charity, DonorsChoose.org, which a number of submitters also asked to plug.

DonorsChoose is indeed a splendid charity -- it's a great execution of a clever concept. I've done some shameless promotion of it in the past, ever since Joel Spolsky turned me onto it.

Celebrities are using it, too. The View host, Sherri "world is flat" Shepherd, is herself a donor -- a Chicago public school classroom received a globe and geography kit in her name. (And according to her comment, I'm getting lots of Heaven credits for it. Yay!)

Alas, Mrs. Shepherd did not submit a reddit logo.



*The inquisitive among you are probably wondering "why until yesterday?" The answer to that question will come tomorrow...

Don't get your hopes up for anything too interesting, you'll just be disappointed.

redditors doodle: tuesday

Team reddit really liked this submission. Hopefully the Sesame Street folks won't sue us; their lawyers are notoriously vicious -- and have perfect spelling!

John Lund designed this homage to his favorite Sesame Street puppet, Ernie. No word on how jealous Bert is feeling right now.

John also asked me to include the following:

Shout out to the letters "C" "R" and the number "7."

I've never been a fan of "C" but I wholeheartedly support his decision to shout-out "R" (preferably in lowercase, but oh well).

Know why I like "7"? Because seven ate nine.


...

I hate myself for having typed that. Thanks for an otherwise great submission, John. Enjoy your 24 hours of quasi-fame on the Interwebs!

redditors doodle: monday

The first winner of redditors doodle the logo week.

Tim Peckham from Toronto sent in this lovely take on the reddit alien. He also mentioned in his email, "Love reddit! Read it every day," which I can assure you had nothing to do with our decision.

Tim used his promo opportunity just to plug the site he used to doodle and his tumblr blog:

I like to draw using http://artpad.com and then just screen grab.

me: hellotim.tumblr.com

So let me go ahead and give Canada some props. I hope some folks at immigration are reading this and will look kindly upon my future citizenship request (I call this "Operation President Giuliani").

Hope to meet you at the Toronto reddit meetup, Tim.

Oh, and there's some more Tim-related work at hellotim.com and timp.ca

oct 22-26: redditors doodle the logo week

I have a pretty awesome job. Frankly, it's kinda absurd. According to the CondéNet org chart, I'm technically a "product manager." This is a curious title for me, as I much prefer "cofounder." Furthermore, we've never really been a company with much of an organizational hierarchy. Hell, there's never been more than 4 of us.

It'd be a pretty pathetic org chart.

But my favorite job has always been doodling the reddit logo. After two years, there have been a lot of logos. Yep, I totally ripped Google off. Only on reddit it's taken to an extreme, we won't do it just for holidays -- it's much more random than that.

Despite all that freedom, I still managed to run out of ideas. Fortunately, redditors contributed some great suggestions, which became parts of an epic logo series.

And now here I am still looking to get out of doodling the logo next week.

I recently got an email that reminded me just how expendable I am:

I've had this taped to my home office wall for many months. My
youngest son liked the alien on my Mac OS X dock (where he saw it as
my icon for Adium...thanks for that!). So here I present what he
drew when he was 4 (he is now 5 and has moved to copying the
characters in his Pokemon book)...


by Will.


BTW, he calls him "cute guy."

Cheers,

// tim

Will's drawing absolutely made my day. Not only did I want to showcase his talent in today's logo, I wanted to give other artists the chance to try their hand at doodling next week's logos.

So if you can work some magic within a 120x40 pixel .png file, email me over the weekend with your take on the reddit logo and I'll put the first 5 I get best 5 (as selected by our distinguished judges) online over the next 5 days starting Monday. Don't worry, you needn't be a Monet or a Lichtenstein -- just don't be a Kinkade.

I'll also do a quick blurb on my blog for each logo, which you can use to plug whatever you want.

Here are the quick n' dirty requirements:

• 120x40px .png file
• the word "reddit" should be visible
  
• creature vaguely resembling the reddit alien
• brief description for me to post along with your personal shout-outs and/or self-promotion