Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

I’m about to head down to Maker Faire, which takes place in San Mateo over the weekend. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a DIY festival, which means that there’s all kinds of wicked cool stuff on display. Flaming things, things that make noise, things that shoot stuff, and lots and lots of things with blinky lights. Tons of pictures and video forthcoming over the next few days, and don’t miss all the awesome robot goodness that I’ll be posting on BotJunkie.

[ Maker Faire ]

By David Ponce

So, by a wide margin, the above design was chosen by you guys. We’re not actually going to make this shirt, but to be fair to everyone, we’ll give the prizes to the person who did this. I guess we can call it a consolation prize? Whatever it is, congrats to you my dear man. I don’t know if you wish to be named, so I won’t, but I’ll be in touch by email.

Meanwhile, the team at Splitreason is hard at work making us a design. We’re all holding our breaths that it’ll be nice, and we’ll let y’alls know soon’s it’s ready.

By David Ponce

Just want to let you guys know that if you leave a comment, and it doesn’t appear immediately, it’s because our spam filter, Akismet, has decided that everything is spam. I’ve spent a good deal of time manually removing comments from the spam queue, so your words should eventually appear. I’ve also contacted the Akismet team, but who knows how long it’ll be. So, keep leaving comments… it just might take a little longer to appear. And I’ll let y’alls know when things are back to normal.

By David Ponce

You guys spoke, and we heard you. For those of you with no clue of what I’m talking about, I’m referring to this article where we announce that no one won our T-Shirt design contest. Many of you pointed out that it wasn’t fair to those who worked hard at these designs, and that even if we don’t end up using any of the submissions, we should at least reward someone for their work.

You’re absolutely right.

So, big apologies are in order. We never meant to cop out of anything, and certainly didn’t mean to make you guys work with no intention of rewarding anyone. It was an error in judgment on my part, and I’m really sorry. At the time, it seemed to make sense, but looking back, it was stupid.

So, without further adieu, I’d like you guys to hit the jump so you can look at everything that came in, and vote on a winner. I’m not placing names next to the submissions, simply because someone might take offense. If you want to claim your work in the comments, you’re free to do so. To vote, simply leave a comment for your favorite.

And, finally, we’re aware that many of these are really cool. We didn’t decide to not use any (double negatives, eh?) because they all sucked, at all. We just wanted a little more. And thanks so much for everyone who entered.

[ Update: I’m aware that #11 and #1 are dupes. Further proof that yours truly is retarded. ]

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By David Ponce

It’s not that all the designs sucked. Although some did. It’s just that nothing really blew our minds. So we’ve decided to hire some pros, and pay for a design. And we’re really, really hoping that cash buys talent, or creativity, or whatever it is we wanted to see in a design.

For those of you who sent in a design, please, don’t be upset. Some of that stuff was great. It may just be that we’re suffering of a bad case of being too picky.

We’ll let you know when the shirts are ready!

It’s that time of the month again, when thank some of the folk that make this site possible. This particular company is behind a range of services, like URLBrief, Blog In Space and the potentially market-disrupting Social Spark, now in private alpha.

That company is IZEA.

Thanks for your support, guys.

By David Ponce

As of writing, there are about 36 hours left before the deadline on our T-Shirt design contest. We’ve received a good number of entries, a few of which are actually good, but I’m sure there’s more to come. Remember, up for grabs is an Oberon watch from Tokyoflash, a Neuros OSD and $200 of cold hard cash. Plus the pride of being the one who designed the OhGizmo T-Shirt.

So, that deadline again is 11:59PM, Eastern time.

Update: As someone pointed out in an email, maybe I should have included instructions on how to submit. Just send a small snapshot to ogcontests at gmail. If we select you, be prepared to have a PSD or vector file of your design.

By David Ponce

It’s been about five days since we launched our design competition, and we’ve received a few interesting submissions. But, man, not nearly enough! What’s up guys? Not that inspired? Not that interested in the stuff you can win?

So, let me ask y’all: what could make your creative juices flow? What can we offer to make this a contest worth entering? I ain’t saying we can suspend the laws of the universe on your behalf, but… ask and you may receive.

By David Ponce

After looking at a few of the early submissions for the OhGizmo T-Shirt Design Contest, I’m realizing that perhaps I didn’t convey the concept clearly enough. Quite a few of the designs involve simply placing the logo somewhere on the shirt. And while we applaud the simplicity, we’re not looking for something that will appeal to OhGizmo readers only.

The Splitreason store gets geeky clients from all over, and we’re hoping to be able to sell a shirt to someone that hasn’t even heard of us before. To give you an idea of the type of designs we’re looking for, take a look at a couple of the other partner stores on the Splitreason site: Destructoid or Ctrl-Alt-Del. The brand is present throughout, but the designs are cool regardless of the logo.

I wanted to make this clear as soon as possible, before some of you spend too much time trying to find the optimal position for the OhGizmo logo.

Thanks all.

By David Ponce

You guys have been asking for it, so we’re doing it! We’ve decided to partner up with Splitreason and print us a T-Shirt. And we want all y’all to help us get a great design. So what better way than to get our overproductive, blog-readin’, gadget-addicted, OhGizmo-lovin’ readers involved? And if we choose your design, here’s what you’ll get:

- $200 to be paid out to you any way you want… As long it’s not an annoying way, or a stupid way, or any sort of way that would involve you trying to be some sort of funny.

- The Oberon Watch from our good friends at Tokyoflash. Long time readers of the site will know they make the most attention grabbing, impossible to read, wrist-worn conversation starters money can buy. That’s a $145 value. By the way, our man Paul at Tokyoflash would like to inform readers that they’re offering a 1,000 yen discount to everyone who plays their Hanami game and makes a purchase by April 7th.

- One Neuros OSD. It’s an awesome little device that allows you to extract all video content from any source and digitize it. That way, you can backup all your VHS, home videos, etc. for later enjoyment, or you can simply transfer them to a mobile device in a variety of formats. That’s a $180 value.

You should also know that once the design is selected, the winner showered with presents and the T-Shirt starts selling like hotcakes… we’ll donate $1 per shirt from the first production run to a charity to be chosen by you guys.

Now, since this involves money and all that, we need us some rules. Recently, Joystiq did a similar T-Shirt contest, and we liked their rules so much, we’re swiping them and modifying for our use. So hit the jump for the nitty-gritty.

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