DFTBA Short Story Contest

So the votes are in. Gathered and collected. All counted and all totalised. So now I can reveal to you the final results. Remember, the way these points are counted is that a first place vote = 3pts, a second place vote = 2pts, and a third place vote = 1pts. Let’s start from the bottom and work our way to the top.

The following are all the designs who got positions between last and tenth. In order they are

30th Place: Number eight - six points

29th Place: Numbers three and ten - eight points

28th Place: Numbers thirty one and twenty four - nine points

27th Place: Number thirty - ten points

26th Place: Numbers forty two, thirty three, twenty one and fifteen - eleven points

25th Place: Number twenty seven - twelve points

24th Place: Number forty - thirteen points

23rd Place: Numbers nine and eleven - fourteen points

22nd Place: Number forty one - sixteen points

21st Place: Number two and seventeen - seventeen points

20th Place: Numbers thirteen and nineteen - nineteen points

19th Place: Number six - twenty points

18th Place: Number thirty two - twenty one points

17th Place: Number seven - twenty four points

16th Place: Number one - twenty five points

15th Place: Number twenty - twenty nine points

14th Place: Number thirty seven - thirty two points

13th Place: Numbers five and fourteen - thirty three points

12th Place: Number sixteen - thirty five points

11th Place: Number thirty eight - thirty seven points

Now for the next seven, before we get to the top three, I’m going to be giving a break down of how many votes each one got from each category. Just to hype up the tension a little. So…

Joint 10th place with forty one points was numbers thirty five (13 first, 1 second, 0 third) and eighteen (5 first, 9 second, 8 third)

9th place with forty four points, was number thirty six (6 first, 10 second, 6 third)

8th place with forty eight points was number twenty nine (6 first, 14 second, 2 third)

7th place with fifty points was number twenty five (14 first, 3 second, 2 third)

6th place with fifty one points was number twenty six (8 first, 10 second, 7 third)

Joint 5th place with sixty one points were numbers twenty eight (9 first, 10 second, 14 third) and twenty three (15 first, 6 second, 4 third)

4th place with sixty two points was number twenty two (11 first, 11 second, 7 third)

So now we come to the big ones. The final three. And here we see something of a gap. I’m not only going to post the scores, I’m also going to link you to each of their creators. But for the final victor, first place, only their picture will be shown.

In third place, with eighty nine points (15 first, 16 second, 12 third) was number twelve, by avianfunction. A very impressive design, channelling the Hanklerfish idea. Well done!

In second place, with one hundred and thirteen points (33 first, 5 second, 4 third) was number thirty four by juanabad. An impressively elaborate design, too elaborate for my taste, but clearly very popular. Good work!

But the winner, with a staggering One Hundred and Twenty Eight Points (30 first, 13 second, 12 third) was number four by  happy-smiley-robot.

Let’s say it all together now.

French the Llama!

A superb design, more than worthy to be the flagship piece of this competition! I am very thankful to the person behind the helm of happy-smiley-robot (I would appreciate it if you could send me your IRL name in a message, so that I might be able to credit you appropriately when it comes to putting together the anthology). and very pleased overall, as this happened to be my first choice vote also, and apparently, many many of yours as well. Although it is true that number thirty four got more first place votes, it is the amalgam of everyone’s votes (first, second and third place) that really matters, and so I’m so pleased that a design that had such broad spectrum support from Nerdfigteria and its friends, won out in the end.

Thank you all so much though, for taking part. Everyone whose been involved with this at every stage has been absolutely amazing, and I’m so glad to have been able to be a part of the working together of such an amazing group of talented people. Thank you also to the two hundred and twenty seven of you who voted over the past week. It’s been something of an obsession for me to be keeping up with all of your votes. It’s been a great week, and it’s a great result at the end. Roll on the rest of the contest, and over the next few days, I have exciting news planned…

Final call! This is a last message to everyone who follows this tumblr to let you know that you have slightly less than two hours to cast your votes in the DFTBA short story contest’s logo design competition! I’m not saying anything about who is winning or how close it is at this stage. All I would do is encourage you to vote, now! To see the designs to vote for click here, and to go to the voting page, click on the link above in the picture.

So this is a brief post just to refresh everyone’s memory about the big vote and let you know how everything is going for that.

For those of you who are new, and I see we have several new followers recently, we’re having a vote for the best logo design for our fair and noble contest. DesignersOfTumblr were very gracious in allowing us access to their website to host the contest, and if you want to go and vote on the contest, you can see all forty two of the designs here.

Although I don’t want to reveal to you yet just who is winning, as I don’t want you to be influenced as to who to choose based on who is likely to win, I feel compelled to tell you that in the last few days, the competition has been whittled down from it being a five horse race, with several others in the not too far behind who look as though they might catch up, to becoming a two horse race. There are two designs which are running… not exactly massively close, but far closer to each other than anyone else is to them.

The top design currently has (using my voter totalising system) ninety points from it’s first, second and third place votes. The second design after that is trailing somewhat with seventy nine using the same system. After that, things get more spaced out, with the third place design having sixty three, then fourth having fifty nine, fifth having fifty two and so on.

Those of you who have voted should be able now to see the simplified graphs of results by clicking on the link that you originally used to go to the voting page in the first place. If you do, you should be able to work out fairly quickly which are the two designs I am talking about. If you wish to publicise who is winning to those who have yet to vote, I’ve got nothing against that. I just won’t be doing it here.

One other point. I have seen many of the designers putting on their tumblrs “Voting is open, vote for me here! I’m number X”. While I appreciate that this is perfectly fair and okay to do, and I’m not going to dock points for doing this, I’d prefer it if you advertised to your friends to vote for the best design, rather than just voting for you because they are your friends and you want their help. If you have made the best design, chances are they will vote for you anyway. Tell them that you participated, sure, but also tell them to vote for the one they think is best. Don’t feel upset if they like someone else’s more than yours. It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part. I’d just like the contest as much as possible to be about the designs, rather than becoming a popularity contest.

And finally, remember that the final deadline for the vote (in case I haven’t linked to it enough) is Wednesday at midnight GMT! So you’ve not got long. I see one hundred and seventy five of you have already made your views known! This is excellent and a big thank you to everyone who has voted so far. For those of you who have not, make haste! Thank you all for participating and making this a great contest!

I’ve just discovered that as the admin of the survey which I have set up to organise the voting for the DFTBA short story contest logo design, I can not only how many people have voted for each design, but also what each individual set of votes consist of. So while I can’t see exactly who voted for what, I can see that the second person to vote voted for X, Y and Z, and that the fourteenth person to vote voted for A, B and C etc.

All very interesting, and I was flicking through these to look at trends, when I was sad to see that some people have quite deliberately circumvented the purposes of the three votes. Thus far there have been two people who used all three of their votes to vote for the same candidate, thereby making something of a mockery of where it says on the question “What is your second/third choice”. By definition, your second choice cannot be the same as your first. You’ve already chosen it as your first.

Now I’m not going to name who they voted for so as not to besmirch the good name of that person and their design, but I would say that I am rather disappointed in these two people. The whole reason I gave the three votes system out was to give people the maximum ability to share their tastes without it becoming unwieldy (four or five votes would, I think, have gotten too much). This way, everyone gets as much of their voice heard as possible. The fact that you would abuse that option is… a little sad.

However, all is not lost. The good news is that one of the perks being an admin is that I also have the power to filter results. So I’m pleased to say that these two peoples votes will not be counted. Let that be a lesson to them, and a message to anyone else who tries to muck around with this. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this at all, but I’m even less expecting it now. If you do muck around with the votes, I will be able to see it and your vote won’t count. Fortunately, we’ve had twenty other voters who respect the rules and have listened to what I said at the beginning. Let’s all try to remember to be awesome and take part in this as the spirit of it requires, hmm?

If you are wanting to vote fairly, go here to do so!

Best wishes and DFTBA

EDIT: It’s now three people. This isn’t cool. Please stop. I can detect it, your vote won’t count.

The following are three designs who were latecomers to the original contest entry by one or two hours I imagine. These though will be the VERY LAST!

Forty by heyrhia

Forty One by  rachelgabrielle

Forty Two by Zhiyong Xu

I’ve adjusted the survey accoridngly, although for one reason or another it has put the new votes way up at the top, so not at all in numerical order. Just a little annoyance though. Do please go on and continue in voting!

To vote go here

All the submissions are in, all the designs have been collected. It’s now time, on the occasion of the sixtieth post to this blog, for the democratic process to do it’s thing!

Right now, if you click on that picture (assuming I have worked my Tumblr magic right, but if I haven’t click here) you will be taken to a website where you will be asked not one, not two, but THREE questions. Yes, you each have an option to cast three votes on which of our amazing thirty nine forty two logos (or amazing thirty eight, and my one graphic oddity) are worthy to become the DFTBA short story contest’s logo of choice.

Numerically speaking, the way this will work is as follows. Everyone gets three votes, but your vote for your first choice counts for three points, your vote for your second choice counts two points and your vote for your third choice counts for one point. At the end of the week, all the results will be totaliser and the winner will be the one with the most points. I should add here, because of the way the survey is designed, I don’t know how to eliminate your previous selection from the list of total choices. Therefore, I’m just going to ask, please DON’T vote for the same design three times. It will really just muck things up, and it’s not really in the spirit of things. If anyone’s got any questions about that, feel free to send them to me in an ask.

This is a big week for the contest, and I’m very excited. This logo will be the emblem of the contest. It will be on the E-Book Anthology’s cover and will be embedded into everyone’s ticket. Before we do go into things however, I would like to take a moment to talk about how you might want to use your vote.

Remember this is a logo! - When I gave the brief about the contest to DesignersOfTumblr I said four words. “bold, bright, fun and clear”. A logo MUST be clear. Simple, easy to identify and quick to glance at and understand. So please don’t just base your choice on which one is the prettiest. I apologise if that sounds patronising, but it’s something I just wanted to put out there. It’s a logo first and foremost. We will be having to build the website around this logo also, along with putting it on the E-book front cover. Given most e-readers somewhat limited graphic potential, the simpler and clearer the better. That way, it will come out better on the screen at the end. It’s quite clear from the designs, people have by and large understood this, I just wanted to put it out there for the voters too. Please don’t mistake simplicity for being boring! Not at all! Clarity is never boring when it communicates something awesome.

With that done, I’m now going to link you to each of the designs, and their made of awesome creators. I’m not putting the pictures up here, since I think over the past few weeks you’ve seen them on here a great deal. So here is each picture linked and their creators credited

One by bakerie

Two by pondear

Three by mstrimmer

Four by happy-smiley-robot

Five by happy-smiley-robot

Six by jbgirl

Seven by happy-smiley-robot

Eight by mullixhi

Nine by snowcones

Ten by shantypants

Eleven by JasonEtcoDesign

Twelve by avianfunction

Thirteen by Cigam (ross92@gmail.com)

Fourteen by ghostsinyourbed

Fifteen by elithegirl

Sixteen by onewhiteye

Seventeen by vibeout

Eighteen by Patrice Horvath

Nineteen by aostrancosebarrancos

Twenty by che502

Twenty One by bittersweetlegendary

Twenty Two by tylermckee

Twenty Three by -fixedatzero

Twenty Four by rachitjain

Twenty Five by perpetualthoughts

Twenty Six by tylermckee

Twenty Seven by  princessparkingonly

Twenty Eight by whentheskyisfalling

Twenty Nine by perpetualthoughts

Thirty by  rebornherooftime

Thirty One by mikerojo

Thirty Two by keeerngraphicdesigner

Thirty Three by essentiallyme

Thirty Four by juanabad

Thirty Five by thehatmanandrobin

Thirty Six by prescottmark

Thirty Seven by theslybrownfox

Thirty Eight by cecart

Thirty Nine by  thomascullen

EDIT Three latecommers who I am being lenient on

Forty by heyrhia

Forty One by  rachelgabrielle

Forty Two by  Zhiyong Xu

If you want to scroll through every single one of these as images, you can of course go here to see the page designersoftumblr have very graciuosly dedicated to us and our contest lo, this past month. I’d like to thank everyone whose name is on that list above for taking part, and to thank Elliott Mariess for his exceptionally positive response to my suggestion and now I thank you, the voting readership of this project’s blog, for reading all the way down to the base here. It only remains for me to say, that you have one week! Voting closes on the midnight of February 15th GMT so get voting!

PS. One thing I forgot to mention. As much as I like them, and as much as I’m sure the people who designed the logos like them, likes and reblogs are not votes! I have nothing against likes & reblogs. I like them a lot, but I just want people to be sure, we’re only counting votes on the website!

Good morning fellow tumblrers, we’re going two up from the last post as this update comes to you in five parts, lets get right to it!

Part 1: News

So three little pieces of contest news. Firstly, we’re up to thirty six followers on Tumblr, thank you very much to you all! Secondly, we now have a new link location. On the Nerdfighters Ning, if you hover your mouse over the tab button marked “NF Projects” you will see a tab for this project descend, and link you directly here. Thanks very much to the Ningmaster known as “The Lone Wanderer” for his help on that one. Thirdly, the contest now has its own dedicated e-mail address.

DFTBA[DOT]Short[DOT]Story[DOT]Contest[AT]Inbox[DOT]Com

This will be important in posts to come. Lets move on.

Part 2: Familiar faces, new roles

Because this is a big project, and because a fair bit of it involves things that I don’t know how to do, there’s going to be one or two other people on board. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Chris Dolman, the man who did the excellent video discussing initial details of the project, to be our head web design man. Although I’m a dab hand with Tumblr, this chap has the much more daunting task of creating our own dedicated web site, specificity for the contest, with specific sections which can only be accessed by people who have submitted their entrance fee. That’s really important I feel, since really, this is as much about charity as it is about writing, and I really don’t want people who are participating who arn’t entering into the spirit of both parts of what we’re about here.

Part 3: Definite dates

So I know that in the last post I said that we were thinking that we’d probably do this from between October 2nd and November 2nd but people have, in discussions on this, said two things to me.

- Why wait so long!

- That’s cutting it a bit fine, isn’t it?

Now originally, the reason I wanted to wait was because I wanted to link it in directly to the project for awesome, and also I was thinking that this was a big project, which would take a lot of organising, and would be very very difficult to get done. But then I stopped and thought, and I realised that there are only really two big obstacles that need to be got over before the contest can start. Getting all the judges sorted, and getting the website up and running.

So with that in mind, now that Mr Dolman is on board and helping us out, I’m pleased to say that I have a definite date for when the contest is going to start. This is going to be the date that the prompt for the contest is revealed, the website is going to go live and when you can start submitting your stories. And that date is…

April 21st!

And the contest will close on…

October 2nd

And the results will be out on…

Well that one’s trickier. It mainly involves how many people will be entering. Hopefully though, it will be before December 17th, and so in time for the Project for Awesome.

Part 4: A contest within a contest

So as I’ve said before, I’d like this to be something that Nerdfighters take part in on every level, as much as is possible. This isn’t just going to be something for people who like writing. Therefore, what I’d like to do is to open up a very important part of the contest to the wider Nerdfighter community, or at least, to a different slice of it. I’d like the attention of anyone interested in…

Graphic Design

We’re looking for people to design the logo for the DFTBA short story contest of 2012. And as far as I can tell, that’s the only real hard and fast rule. The logo has to contain the words “DFTBA Short Story Contest 2012”. Beyond that, we’re pretty free and easy. For contest submission & information, go here

The deadline for this part of the contest will be…

February 8th

Whereupon, I will select a number of the best of the submissions, to be voted on by the wider nerdfighter community. The voting for this will close on…

February 22nd

So that will be the day that everyone knows what the contest’s logo will be

A couple of guidelines. Remember, this is part of the Nerdfighter community, so using images and symbols that Nerdfighteria is familiar with, will be a good route to go down. The nerd hands gesture, puppy sized elephants, french the Llamma etc.

Also, its for charity, so if you could incorperate that, it would be good too. Maybe also use some of the fonts that have been used for other things, or take design ideas from past logos, that sort of thing.

Finally, although the rule is that you must include the words “DFTBA Short Story Contest 2012” in the logo, if you can make a logo that could easily have part of it be made a kind of…icon… a little picture that by itself could be the symbol for the contest, that would be good too. There probably is a technical name for that, I’m not sure.

None of these ideas are hard and fast rules. If you create something great that breaks them all, all the better for us and you. These are just thoughts that I had. I stopped doing graphic design when I was 16, so don’t consider me an expert on that!

Also, one final note, you will be credited, and there is a very very good chance we will ask you to design the front cover for the anthology, when it is released, also!

Part 5: More judges! Nerdfighter judges!

So as you know, we already have two excellent judges lined up! Marcy Collier and Katie Biela, but I’m thinking…more…

Specificity, as one person mentioned earlier in their question, we need some nerdfighter judges. This should be a contest run by nerdfighters, for nerdfighters (although others are of course allowed in). Now I’m still in contact with other groups who themselves are outside the nerdfighter community, but who would be more than eminently suitable for this task, but there is nothing wrong with making this more in house also.

However, we should keep in mind that the role of a judge is one that comes with some degree of authority, and as I’m sure you’ll agree, as editor of a magazine that reviews books, and as an English Lit teacher at one of the USAs best prep schools, Ms Biela and Ms Collier are eminently qualified. The thing is, out there, I’m sure there are plenty of other very qualified people, but for the task of judging stories like this, you really do have to be qualified in some way.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a teacher or an editor. Maybe you’ve read and reviewed many a book for a personal site. Maybe your a well practiced beta reader, who’s helped many stories reach their full potential. Maybe you’ve written a lot and feel you would be well placed to be able to look at others work and tell where its good, where it’s bad and what would make it better. Maybe you’ve got a keen reading eye, and noticed my earlier spelling mistake with “your” and “you’re” etc.

The point is, you are out there, nerdfighter judges! So come forth! We’ll be selecting a total of twelve of you (just like in a real jury) so there are ten spots left. Please e-mail the following address and include a resume/CV of why you think you are qualified to be a judge on the DFTBA short story contest of 2012. Include as much detail as you can. Also, put the word “JUDGE” in all caps as part of the subject line.

DFTBA[DOT]Short[DOT]Story[DOT]Contest[AT]Inbox[DOT]Com

The deadline for judges entries will be…

April 8th

After that, the judges will be announced on…

April 21st

When the website goes live.

There’s been a lot of dates in this post, so to clarify with a calander at the bottom here.

January 8th - Opening of the contest for designing a logo, and opening of positions to be in the panel of Nerdfighter judges

February 8th - Deadline for submitting a design for the logo

February 22nd - Last day of voting for which logo design will become the official one for the contest

April 8th - Deadline for submitting a CV/Resume applying for a Nerdfighter judging position.

April 21st - The main, dedicated website goes live, the judges are announced, the prompt is revealed and people can begin entering.

October 2nd - The deadline for the last story entrant.

Hope that has clarified things for everyone! If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.

Best wishes, and as always, DFTBA.