September 5, 2007
Announcing the Grand Text Auto Alan Turing Memorial T-Shirt Design Competition — Enter Now!
It just occurred to me. The name is great and the logo is familiar, but sometimes I look at the blue, and the orange, and the sort off-brown and the, what, light blue, same logo, same site, and I think to myself, “I don’t even have a Grand Text Auto T-shirt and if this site was a T-shirt I’m not even sure I’d wear it, man.” We need some cool T-shirts, and I think we need something fresh, textual, vivid, new. Therefore, I announce the first annual Grand Text Auto Alan Turing Memorial T-shirt design competition. Here’s how it works: you design a Grand Text Auto T-shirt at Cafe-Press and post a link to your design here by Friday, September 21, 2007. We select the best T-shirt from the submissions, and I send the winner a T-shirt, and additionally, wear that T-shirt to the Grand Text Auto symposium at the Beall Center for Arts and Technology on October 5, 2007, and maybe some of these other people buy T-shirts too. That’s right, I’ll buy you a T-shirt if you design a cool one. I’ll also send you an autographed photo of Interactive Fiction guru and MIT professor Nick Montfort wearing either a white T-shirt, no logo, or a blue button-down shirt, also no logo. If he refuses to autograph the photo, I will do so myself. Either way, if you win, you get a T-shirt. If you are creative, and strong, and brave, and you act now, and win. What are you waiting for? Add a Grand Text Auto T-shirt to my closet and yours.
Incidentally, the T-shirt need not have anything to do with Alan Turing. I just feel bad about the way he was treated while he was alive, and thought something important should be named after him.
September 5th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
And I’ll throw in a free copy of Second Person for the winner as well.
(I was sent two copies by mistake, and I’ve been meaning to figure out what to do with it. :-)
September 5th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Great idea, people. If I were braver, and more creative, I’d try to see if you could guess whether I was a t-shirt designer or not….
Quick answer? I’m not. But I’ll certainly buy one when someone passes your Turing test.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Excellent, excellent idea. Does it have to be interactive? :)
September 5th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Here ya go.
http://www.cafepress.com/scrabblelover99
September 6th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Erik, my colleagues might correct me on this but in my view designing a t-shirt is in itself a form of interaction.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
bastards at cafepress censored my tshirt design!!!
I uploaded it to customink.
September 7th, 2007 at 1:03 am
My idea is a pretty obvious one, but if anyone finds it fun, I’ll be happy to put a higher-res image up on Café Press (assuming they don’t delete it for some kind of perceived copyright violation).
Here’s the image
September 7th, 2007 at 1:50 am
If I had announced the contest, I would have required copyright violations.
September 7th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Geez — I wonder if Cafepress thought it was a violation of Scrabble or that video game where you drive around and beat up prostitutes on the street? Or us? I mean, you can have my permission to use the term “Grand Text Auto” in any context you’d like. You could name a breakfast cereal after it for all I care, a novel, sex toys, whatever. Where will the madness end?
September 14th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
There better not be a copyright problem with this T-shirt.
September 17th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
U. Sam, that’s an interesting design, but I’m concerned that it offers no guarantee that the colors won’t run. Isn’t such labeling standard?
September 19th, 2007 at 5:02 am
I know it’s totally uncool to enter a contest I myself announced, like publishing my own poetry or something (wait, actually, I totally do that) but I was getting concerned if we don’t get more entries the t-shirts might turn out to be like, well, kind of lame, and that’s just not my thing in t-shirt-wearing. I think that somebody out there can do better than this in the next two days, but to spur competition, here’s a GTA design based on the output of two site visualization tools, tagcrowd and HTML graph.
Here’s a shirt: http://www.cafepress.com/grandtextauto
September 20th, 2007 at 1:25 am
[…] y nick @ 1:24 am Scott needs a t-shirt, pronto! If you don’t end up entering his contest […]
September 20th, 2007 at 9:25 am
if we don’t get more entries the t-shirts might turn out to be like, well, kind of lame
hey, my submission wasn’t lame
September 20th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Sean, apologies, man. I wasn’t trying to say that your design was lame, just to suggest that we need more shirts to give the thing a sense of magnitude.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:20 am
if I win, I will make my logo look better, with real scrabble tiles.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I don’t think Scott meant to bag on the existing entries. He probably just wanted to encourge other people to participate, which I was I was trying to do with my recent post.
September 20th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Never commented here before, but I follow the blog, and jump at chances not to do real work for an afternoon. So:
http://www.cafepress.com/gtam
I don’t know if it comes out on the shirt. More a tribute than real design, I suppose. So at least enjoy the original: http://knox-web.com/a/gta-blk.png
(sources: Michael Mates, Andrew Stern: facade; Noah Wardrip-Fruin: screen; Nick Montfort: Book and Volume; Mary Flanagan: theHouse; Scott Rettberg: The Unknown. some of which are ‘et al’ of course.)
September 20th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Here is my t-shirt: http://www.cafepress.com/ldargin
I hope the phrase “Grand Turing” is apparent in it.
September 20th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Awesome! Now we have some competition. I’m going to be in the outback in Southwest Australia for the next couple of days to document the behavior of feral kangaroos for a cell phone video art project, but I’ll log back in on Sunday. Based on a sampling of user and driver feedback and my own sense of what will look good on my body, I’ll choose the winner, and the autographed photo of Nick Montfort, copy of Second Person, and brand new T-shirt will be the property of one lucky GTxA T-shirt designer. We’ll close off the submissions at midnight Pacific time tomorrow.
September 21st, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Another one.
http://www.cafepress.com/gtaeliza