Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition

Competition Overview

The com­pe­ti­tion was to design new icons for Adobe prod­ucts, with the Creative Suite 3 appli­ca­tion icons at their core. Entrants had tode­sign at least three (3) icon-sized rep­re­sen­ta­tions of at least Photoshop, Illustrator, and one oth­er CS3 appli­ca­tion. The more icons redesigned, the better.

At the end of the con­test all entries in the con­test were pub­lished on Quark VS InDesign​.com and made avail­able for free down­load as both Mac- and Windows-format icons, ready for use on desk­tops, docks, and file sys­tems across the globe. Each entran­t’s name (or team name), studio/company, and Website is list­ed with the icons she designed, thus pro­mot­ing to Quark VS InDesign​.com’s many read­ers and icon enthu­si­asts a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty of designers.

The con­test ran for three months, with entries accept­ed from 29 January 2007 through 23 April 2007. Winners were announced on Quark VS InDesign​.com 1 May 2007.

Eligibility

The Quark VS InDesign​.com Design Your Own Creative Suite 3 Icons Competition was open to vir­tu­al­ly any­one, any­where in the world–even to Adobe employees!

Eligibility was exceed­ing­ly sim­ple: You must not work for me, and you must be a cit­i­zen of plan­et earth.

If you work for or are relat­ed to Pariah S. Burke, I’m afraid you’re inel­i­gi­ble. Sorry, Mom, Sam, Jeremy, Elisabetta, and every­one else in this group. (If you don’t fall into the this group but do owe me mon­ey, you have to square with me before you can enter.)

To enter and win the con­test you must be a cit­i­zen of plan­et Earth. We apol­o­gize to our design col­leagues from the Crab Nebula and the illus­tra­tors’ com­mune on Io, but we have many excel­lent prizes to award in this con­test, and off-planet ship­ping rates have soared in recent months. If you live in any coun­try on Earth with a postal sys­tem capa­ble of deliv­er­ing prizes to you, then you are eli­gi­ble to enter this contest.

If you live on plan­et Earth and I don’t share blood or a pay check with you, you are eli­gi­ble to enter this con­test. It’s even open to employ­ees of prize fur­nish­ers!* And, if any­one with­in Adobe would like to present an alter­nate idea for the CS3 icons, she is more than wel­come to do so.

Non-Competitive Entries

The pur­pose of this con­test is to have fun and to share alter­nate ideas for Adobe appli­ca­tion icons with oth­er users and fans of Adobe soft­ware around the world. To facil­i­tate that goal we have the broad­est pos­si­ble eli­gi­bil­i­ty require­ments, but for those who don’t meet eli­gi­bil­i­ty to win the con­test (as well as those who may wish to par­tic­i­pate anony­mous­ly), there is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tribute to the icon designs with­out com­pet­ing in the con­test. On the con­test entry form is a checkbox–“I am not com­pet­ing to win.” If you check that box, your icon designs will not be judged as a pos­si­ble win­ner, but will be made avail­able for down­load free to all com­ers at the end of the con­test, and will pro­mote you, your com­pa­ny, and the Website address you provide.

Because non-competitive con­tri­bu­tions are not con­sid­ered when judg­ing win­ners and award­ing prizes, any­one may sub­mit CS3 icon designs in this manner–even my moth­er, assis­tant, and our friends in the Crab Nebula! (People who owe me mon­ey must still set­tle up!)

* If an employ­ee of a prize fur­nish­er wins, the prize(s) pro­vid­ed by the win­ner’s com­pa­ny will be award­ed to one of the oth­er winners.

Entry Details

In order to be con­sid­ered valid, entries had to meet the fol­low­ing sub­mis­sion criteria:

  • Include at least three (3) icons for Creative Suite 3 appli­ca­tions, includ­ing ones for Photoshop, Illustrator, and a third of your choos­ing. Icons for any Adobe appli­ca­tion will be accept­ed as the third or addi­tion­al icon designs. QuarkXPress fans may also sub­mit a redesigned icon for that appli­ca­tion as the third or addi­tion­al icon designs. The more icons you enter for dif­fer­ent Adobe (or Quark) appli­ca­tions, the bet­ter we will be able to judge the cohe­sion of your theme. (Why stop at three any­way? It’s so fun to make icons!)
  • Be orig­i­nal designs cre­at­ed by the entrant and free from any copy­right or trade­mark claims that would hin­der our abil­i­ty to dis­trib­ute the final designs on Quark VS InDesign.
  • Be deliv­ered as 24- or 32-bit RGB PSD, AI, or PNG files. Designs are not required to be full color–if you want to sub­mit grayscale designs, do so–but the file for­mat must be RGB in a high col­or space. Embedding of an ICC pro­file is option­al, but encouraged.
  • Each sub­mit­ted file must con­tain only one (1) icon design. Thus, you must sub­mit a min­i­mum of three doc­u­ments in an eli­gi­ble entry.
  • Submitted doc­u­ments must be enti­tled only with the name of the appli­ca­tion they rep­re­sent. For instance, a PSD con­tain­ing a design for an InCopy icon must be saved as “incopy.psd”; an Illustrator doc­u­ment con­tain­ing an icon for Adobe Flash should be saved under the file name “flash​.ai.”
  • All designs must be a max­i­mum of 256x256 pix­els and a min­i­mum of 64x64 pix­els. We will take care of resiz­ing them and pro­vid­ing Mac- and Windows-compatible icon files of all stan­dard sizes (e.g. 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, and so on).
  • All doc­u­ments must be com­pressed togeth­er in a .ZIP archive and sub­mit­ted with the entry form. (Instructions are in the entry form.)

Even Better

Contestants were able to enter up to three (3) dif­fer­ent sets of designs. Although an entrant could only win once, all the designs sub­mit­ted were con­sid­ered eli­gi­ble for win­ning the con­test. Also, up to three (3) con­tributed sets of icons will be pre­sent­ed for down­load from Quark VS InDesign​.com at the end of the con­test, with accom­pa­ny­ing cred­it to the con­tes­tant and a hyper­link to her Website.

Deadline for Entry

Entries were accept­ed until Midnight Pacific Time on 23 April 2007. That was three extra hours for you New Yawk design­ers, and eight more hours for you Greenwich folks and those in the mil­i­tary count­ing Zulu time. All sub­mis­sions had to be deliv­ered through the PDF entry form that was pro­vid­ed dur­ing the con­test, and received by the Quark VS InDesign​.com mail servers no lat­er than 00:00 24 April 2007. After that, we began for­ward­ing the mail to the FBI say­ing entrants were spam­ming us (just kidding).

The entry form was writ­ten in English (or as close an approx­i­ma­tion as my American edu­ca­tion allows), and, although the con­test was open to all lan­guage speak­ers cur­rent­ly resid­ing on plan­et Earth, they had to be able to read, under­stand, agree to, and fol­low the terms and instruc­tions as writ­ten in English. All infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by entrants, and all cor­re­spon­dence between entrants and Quark VS InDesign​.com and/or prize fur­nish­ers in con­nec­tion with this con­test was con­duct­ed in English (most­ly because I don’t know more than a few col­or­ful phras­es in any oth­er language).

Contact and Press Information

Questions? Praise? Complaints? Marriage pro­pos­als? Please con­tact the pub­lish­er (me) using the means on the Contact page.

View the press release announc­ing the win­ners here.

View the press release announc­ing this con­test here.

Members of the press may down­load Quark VS InDesign​.com logos here (Zip, 8.2 MB).

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