Phew. Crazy week, and thanks to all those who entered and took the time to create your @dribbble related masterpieces. If your reading this and have no idea what I’m on about, best check this post which explains everything. Done that? Grand. So… The winners!

Again, huge thank you’s to all of you, from the ridiculous, to the hilarious to the downright I have absolutely no idea what the hell you were on about. If you want to look at all the entries I received I’ve made a Flickr album, which you can look at here

The (ahem) Winners!

So a little explanation into how I (with help) picked the winners. In the original ‘brief’ – I asked for entries that focused on a pivotal moment in history, and to take that moment and create a @dribbble related pun. Some, although were fab entries, missed this point a little. So while execution may not have been better than some of the others – these three ‘winners’ hit this on head AND made me smile. So here they are, in no particular order.

Winner 1

Congratulations MICHAEL DRAVNIEKS. Spot on what I was after – funny, simple and perfect pun.

Winner 2

Congratulations ANDREW CREEK. Great execution and love the idea.

And last, but not least Winner 3

Congratulations MATT DUNN. Probably my fave out the bunch. I love how its been taken and inserted into the exact situation that @dribbble facilitates.

That’s all folks

If the winners could please email me at [ ahoyhoy {at} wezmaynard {dot} com ], I’ll get the invites sent to you asap. Thanks to all those that did enter – and fear not, all is not lost! I tend to get invites fairly regularly, so please check back from time to time for my next ridiculous @dribbble competition – movie themed next time.

Hello internet chums. So long story short – I haz @dribbble invites. Three of them to be exact. If you haven’t managed to get your mits on one yet – why not? It seems the latest internet trend is to start some ridiculously long winded way of getting those without invites to bow down to those who have. This is no exception.

Well sort of. Is this a competition? Yes! Does it rely on your design skills? Hell to the no! I’ve blown past invites looking for talent, and look where thats got me 90% are yet to @dribbble more than 10 images. The point of this competition? Well if I can’t draft in the best designers for my ‘team’ I’m sure as hell making sure I get the funnys in! The one thing @dribbble is missing (if anything) is a bit of gorilla humour. Adding some funny where you wouldn’t expect it. So… If you think you’re a funny little monkey – you better read on…

So what’s this all about?

Right, so better start off with the basics. If you don’t know what @dribbble is – here’s a quick FYI coming at ya! (Not physically, obviously, don’t duck or anything. Fool. I Pity the fool! I do!)

Dribbble is show and tell for designers, developers and other creatives. Share sneak peeks of your work as “shots” — small screenshots of the designs and applications you’re working on.

You can read more about @dribbble here. So think you want in? Wicked! So I mentioned before I’m all about the funny, who isn’t? (If you neither know/like ‘Father Ted’ – this is you. Your not into funny. Sorry).

How to grab yourself an invite

All you have to do is find a moment from history, anything. A moment that was pivotal in something bigger than the people/person/thing in the moment could have ever imagined how HUGE an effect that that particular moment would be. Once you have selected yours, pick a still, crack open PS/FW/MS PAINT and get a witty @dribbble related pun in there. I’ve fashioned a (very) hastily thrown together mock below to give you an idea. I expect yours to be MUCH better!

The rules

Create you comedy masterpiece, post a comment below and a link to where i/we can see it. You’ve got until Friday 6th August 12pm (BST) to post. Extra points for originality, being close to the bone and execution. You should probably link to your actual site just incase we have a tie-break situation. Thats it really – you can enter as many times as you like – BUT you can only win one invite. I have three to pass out. I’ll post the, ahem, ‘winners’ in the comments section by 3pm on the same day the entries shut. Thats it. Good luck peeps!

Its taken *roughly* around 2 years, 24 months, 720 days, 17,280 hours, 1,036,800 minutes and 62,208,000 seconds in the making – as well as the last 10 extra minutes to work that post padding arithmetic out – but I finally have my site alive and breathing once again. I wish I could say that every minute of every day, (prior to now), has been filled with amazing things that have stopped me completing this most urgent of projects, but the sombre truth I’m afraid is, I haven’t.

As anyone who i’ve worked with will testament to, I tend to fuss over the tiniest of details. This, coupled with a sharp loathing I have for everything i’ve been creating for more than a week (always because i’ve come up with a better solution to the one i originally devised), were definitely contributing factors, but I don’t believe in all honesty I could say these were defining reasons why this site has taken me so long.

The fact that my weekday evenings are taken up with all manner of sports, band practices and quality time with Rach and the doggles could equally be considered perfectly reasonable reasons why this endeavor has taken longer than Billy Connolly does getting to a punch line. I’d wager I could even partly blame some time lost on the seemingly never ending number of times we’ve moved house in the last 2 years, but once again – not the reason.

The crux of the matter is simply I did not believe the efforts I were designing were good enough to be shown to my peers. This site, as it stands is (and for how long that is, is anyone’s guess) version 27c in a long line of failed and pathetic attempts at trying to put something that was, in equal parts, reflective, clear, logical and captivating onto the www’s. Although I am as happy as I think it is possible for me to be, judging my own work, I can already see improvements that need to be undertaken. For me, the drive to try and keep pace with the best our industry has to offer finally caused me to put up, shut up and flick the switch to ‘on’.

The nuts and bolts of it

For those that are interested, this site took me around a week to design from top to bottom. I had got to a stage with my iterating where I felt a self imposed deadline would click into gear the skills I had developed in my professional career. This definitely caused more pressure, although ultimately it has created a finished end product. The key goals for this site were to host links and feeds from all my professional social networks – I deliberately keep some separate. It had to host a blog, portfolio and be able to adequately market me and my services.

The design style was based around films and sci-fi illustrations, both of which had a huge impact on me when i was growing up. The type is largely set in League Gothic and Cantarel with Georgia for body copy. Once the site was all rolled up together nicely, my good friend @danielvanc used he big code brain and integrated it with Wordpress – my cms of choice. I considered ExpressionEngine, but i felt the community around wordpress, plugins and sites i’ve dealt with in the pass were best for me in this instance. I may even release a WP theme based on this very site – possibly.

Muchos Appreciendos

The continuing standard of work the fantastic people in our industry keep pumping onto the interwebs will always be an inspiration to me – and with twitter, it’s allot easier to show my gratitude. Some you may know, and those ones you don’t – i’d strongly urge you to check out. So thankyou, in no particular order, @TrentWalton, @espiekermann, @gruber, @27bslash6, @imjustcreative, @jessebc, @bradcolbow, @WeAreAirside , @carsonified, @clearleft, @WolffOlins, @pentagramdesign, @tyler_thompson, @erskinedesign, @ISO50, @squaredeye, @rogieking, @Coudal,@brendandawes, @jonburgerman, @cameronmoll, @jontangerine, @Malarkey, @markboulton, @jasonsantamaria, @simplebits, @zeldman, @Hicksdesign, @maxvoltar, @simoncollison, @elliotjaystocks and @jina. You all rock, and not in a ninja or rockstar way. In a proper, oxford dictionary accepted way of saying I look up to all of you.

So thats post 1 at an end. I hope to post a couple times a month at least, maybe even things you might find useful. Topics that may find themselves on here could include; Design/dev web tips, CSS3, typography, graphic design history, travel, films and music. Things my Colophon won’t tell you include; I’m not a morning person, I love cider and ale, Non web terms for web people make my cringe gland act up – eg ninja and/or rockstar, I hate being late, I dislike rude/arogant people, my favorite film is Jaws, my favorite TV series are Father Ted/Alan Partridge and Black Books, my favorite color is cyan, it annoys me when people refer to dpi when they mean ppi, I’m an inch under 6ft, I almost weigh 13 stone, I’m a size 11 shoe, I consider myself ‘just below’ fit enough, I love traveling, my xbox gamertag is BadgerMcGavin and I love poker.

Any comments on the site in general, or this post? Do please leave them below, and if you feel so inclined – please do send some link love my way. Twitter is my favorite.