The Twitter Fail Whale Pale Ale Contest

Posted on 17. Aug, 2008 by John in Projects, Twitter

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Tripped over this contest in my feeds from tweethunt.org , the competition is to design a Fail Whale Pale Ale label for the mythical brew, here’s how it all got started;

I noticed a reference the other day in someone’s tweetstream to the idea of "Fail Whale Pale Ale ", and I have been able to trace the idea’s origin as far as @stalwartmoonpie . It struck a chord with me; I think I had been talking to too many pub-bound Aussies that day, and I just could not resist riffing on the idea with them. From looking at the spreading appearance of that phrase (via the wonderful Summize Conversational Search site ), it would appear that the idea of "Fail Whale Pale Ale " has struck a chord with others too… a chord played on their funny-bones.

Below are the rules for the design competition if you want to make your own label;

All work submitted must be original art, or modified sufficiently to pass legal muster
All work submitted must be placed under a Creative Commons Attribution license
Only one entry per twitter account, please.
Enter your work by sending email to jeffs at it dot rit dot edu:
- with a subject header of "Fail Whale Pale Ale Label Contest Entry "
- with any drivel you so desire in the body of the message
- with your artwork entry for the First Interplanetary Fail Whale Pale Ale Label Contest in one of the following formats:
  - PNG
  - GIF
  - JPG
  - PDF
  - TIFF
  - EPS
  - SVG
  and attached in a single archive file of zip or tgz format (if you don’t know what that means, then just trip the next geek who wanders by and ask her to explain it to you )
All decisions of the judges are final. Period. Really. Ask my students, you don’t want to piss & moan at me about this. It won’t do any good, and my head may explode all over you. Bribes are acceptable, but expect only random results.
All work must be submitted no later than 11:59 PM UTC on 1 October 2008. Late date-time-stamps will be scoffed at, ruthlessly. Really. Again, ask my students how much I like late work.
Plus any other arbitrary rule I may slip in here at the last minute

With a prize fund of $200 (courtesy of Fail Whale Fan Club and host’s piggy-bank) competition is hotting up, here are some of the entries already submitted

The judges will include;

Fail Whale’s creator, Yiying Lu | Visual Acrobat (YiyingLu.com )
Sean O’Steen (TechMonkeyDesign.com )
Stilgherrian (Stilgherrian.com )
Marina Zurkow (o-matic.com )
and the originator of the phrase "Fail Whale Pale Ale", Jen Chance (@stalwartmoonpie )

It looks like good fun so if you want to get involved start designing, the competition deadline has been extended to the 1st of October, and it looks like the winner might have a beer to put it’s label on, @seancoates has come up with the Fail Whale Pale Ale Recipe . You can follow the tweets on this with the hashtag #fwpa

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