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VGMusic.com Logo Design Contest


Dave Harris
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I hope this is in the right place - and even more so that it's permitted. Let me know if there is a problem.

We're running a little logo design contest at VGMusic. The basic premise is - you guessed it - to design a logo for the site, which ideally incorporates themes of both games and music in a coherent/unified/symbolic/artistic way, and generally represents the site and its content. The current banner sucks - we're looking for the level of quality demonstrated in other site logos such as videogameslive, zophar's domain, ocremix! etc.

The best entry (handpicked by the staff) will receive $100 in store credit for vgmworld.com! The winning design could also end up being used on the site, on t-shirts and other merchandise... you name it.

There's a detailed list of rules here. I understand the resolution limit could be a bit stifling, so be sure to work in a higher resolution and downsize it later if called for. We may need to either vectorise or get a higher resolution version of a given logo at a later date - so keep hold of your work files, whatever format they may be.

f anything seems confusing let me know. Hope you enter!

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!!!

I am totally in for this. I just won a logo contest recently and got a taste for it. :D And while the cause was nice, the prizes sucked! VGM merch == win.

Some advice for you guys, though--you should REALLY have people submit a vector image, not a raster. Any time you resize a raster image, even if it is by a very small amount, you introduce artifacts. Sizing it down is still not safe; edges become blurry and proportions can be lost etc.

GL, hope you get some good submissions!

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Ahh, great, glad to see there's some interest :)

Its about time, that site needed a good design overhaul. This isn't 1999!

Yeah it sure does. We've been stepping around this issue for years now. Powerlord has some plans to rework the entire site from the inside out and make it all databased, but that is proving to be an incredibly complicated process, what with all the stuff on the site and having to read from text files and database it all and argh ... well it's a big kettle of fish putting it simply. I have no idea how that will turn out - but we can't realistically do the front-end without having the back-end at least somewhat sorted out. One hopes maybe a new logo would be a catalyst for a redesign... but perhaps that is wishful thinking.

!!!

I am totally in for this. I just won a logo contest recently and got a taste for it. :D And while the cause was nice, the prizes sucked! VGM merch == win.

Some advice for you guys, though--you should REALLY have people submit a vector image, not a raster. Any time you resize a raster image, even if it is by a very small amount, you introduce artifacts. Sizing it down is still not safe; edges become blurry and proportions can be lost etc.

GL, hope you get some good submissions!

Fantastic. I was thinking about posting about this contest at deviantart, but I didn't know where to put it on the forums... it is quite convoluted over there. I may do eventually though - that is if $100 towards vgm-related stuff is really of interest to them. *shrug*

No worries about the images - I can use the 'trace bitmap' function in Flash. Sometimes that doesn't get ideal results though. In hindsight, 300 x 150 bitmap as the format wasn't the best idea... but I'm hopeful that we'll find a way to work around it if/when we hit problems. By all means, keep vector copies of your own stuff :) I would encourage everyone to do this.

If you know any other artists that would be interested, be sure to pass the info on!

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No worries about the images - I can use the 'trace bitmap' function in Flash. Sometimes that doesn't get ideal results though. In hindsight, 300 x 150 bitmap as the format wasn't the best idea... but I'm hopeful that we'll find a way to work around it if/when we hit problems. By all means, keep vector copies of your own stuff :) I would encourage everyone to do this.

Hey, I only suggested creating thumbnails for anything larger than 350x150. I didn't think it would end up being the actual size we used for the submissions.

(I also suggested accepting SVGs)

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Yeah it sure does. We've been stepping around this issue for years now. Powerlord has some plans to rework the entire site from the inside out and make it all databased, but that is proving to be an incredibly complicated process, what with all the stuff on the site and having to read from text files and database it all and argh ... well it's a big kettle of fish putting it simply. I have no idea how that will turn out - but we can't realistically do the front-end without having the back-end at least somewhat sorted out.

Well, how many people do you have working on it? I'm sure there are at least a couple people who would volunteer their services for such a high-profile site, especially since it gives them material to put on their resumes.

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The frustrating thing is that the requirements for backending vgmusic.com are probably pretty darn similar to those for OCR, most of which is already in place here... it's a shame to have such redundancy. IMO if we could share primary keys or something, or work out some CC attribution license for pieces of OCR's database that you could just use, it'd be preferable.

Seems like some good logo candidates thus far; I'll see if I can't cook something up myself.

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The frustrating thing is that the requirements for backending vgmusic.com are probably pretty darn similar to those for OCR, most of which is already in place here... it's a shame to have such redundancy. IMO if we could share primary keys or something, or work out some CC attribution license for pieces of OCR's database that you could just use, it'd be preferable.

I figured as much, but I didn't want to recommend your services when you already have plenty on your plate.

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Well, how many people do you have working on it? I'm sure there are at least a couple people who would volunteer their services for such a high-profile site, especially since it gives them material to put on their resumes.

Yeah I'm certain there are people who could help out. I think the thing we'd need most help with is data handling... lumping stuff from the current system into the new database by hand (or semi-automatically I should say, as I would hope there'd be some scripts to make this process easier.) In that situation it helps a great deal if you are familiar with the sequencers and whether they have multiple aliases, etc. That's going to take the most time I think. Otherwise, I think Powerlord (and Secret Agent Man) can more or less cope with all the coding-related stuff. It's ultimately an issue of time+effort than difficulty. Isn't it always? :)

That's what I like to see: community involvement. I've already started, but I'm Mr. Old-Fashioned (still mostly pencil and paper and T-squares), looking for time to ink and cleanup and then scan.

Great José, I was hoping you'd submit something. I need to nag Teck some more too :D yeah pencil and paper works just fine.

The frustrating thing is that the requirements for backending vgmusic.com are probably pretty darn similar to those for OCR, most of which is already in place here... it's a shame to have such redundancy. IMO if we could share primary keys or something, or work out some CC attribution license for pieces of OCR's database that you could just use, it'd be preferable.

It all depends what Powerlord has planned and whether it'd be applicable to do that. I don't know enough about databases myself to say either way (or even what that means in practice.) Thanks for the offer one way or another, though. I do know that it'd have all the fancy stuff like sequencer/composer profiles, view by system/game/sequencer/composer/year, forums integrated, all the good stuff you'd expect, so there'd be similarities for sure.

Seems like some good logo candidates thus far; I'll see if I can't cook something up myself.

Excellent. Speaking of which, we now have 27 submissions. It's hotting up!

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Not sure if this has been brought up yet, but are people's submissions taken as is? What I mean is, some of the entries are looking pretty good, but some of them would be even better if they were touched up or altered slightly to taste. Is the staff considering working with the winning entrant to re-work the final version of the logo (if necessary) to everyone's liking?

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The actual prize is the $100 for vgmworld, but it is likely that whoever wins will also have their logo used on the site (because that's really the point.) Yeah we'll work with whomever wins. There's a possibility that minor changes would have to be made to the logo in order for it to fit the design.. but not to a great extent I don't think. If it's a good logo it should be able to fit somehow someway (and may just be a case of removing banner fonts and keeping symbolic content... who knows, I guess we'll jump the hurdle when we get to it.)

All assuming a site redesign actually happens anyway.

José, I personally loved your entry :D

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