Those of you who know the background to friendingtopics will know that the first implementation of the site was very straightforward aesthetically.

In order to give the service the quality feel I felt it deserved in the quickest time possible I needed a designer without a backlog. All the designers I usually use had backlogs… Oh oh.

Listening to twist 13 reminded me of 99designs. Without entering into the whole debate about creatives doing unpaid spec work – it seemed like a cost effective, quick, pain free way to get a new identity worked up. So I took 10 minutes to write a spec and fired up my first logo contest.

So how did it go? Well friending topics now has a new logo, so it went well.

The setup process was painless. Certainly quicker than briefing a human designer, involving less caffeine too.

I got over 90 entries to my contest over 7 days. Over half of these came in the last 2 days of the 7 day contest. There is an option to shorten your contest to just 3 days. Assuming these fall during Mon-Fri I’d guess the extra few $s is worth it.

It’s also worth pointing out that of the 90 easily half are duplicates with small changes – some designers drop a few designs in a batch all with a similar theme but subtley different execution. Coming from an agency background this feels a little like sneaking a look at the designers precious ’sketch’ folder when they are getting a coffee. I kinda like it.

Of the 90+ designs there were easily half a dozen really strong options.

A couple of tips if you are using 99designs which might help you to get the best out of the system.

It seems like you get a batch of new entries soon after doing a batch of star ratings. So rate things continually. You can always change your rating later – so if a 3 star grows on you it can be elevated. But failing to rate labels your contest as potentially problematic, deterring designers from spending time on it.

Also, give feedback to designers. I didn’t do enough of this due to a hectic week – and I suspect it would have allowed some of the designers to rework their design to fit my needs more specifically.

Also, be VERY clear in your comments. A lot of the designers don’t have English as a first language so if you are ambiguous you might get the opposite of what you expect. Avoid requests as statements: ‘it might look better in upper rather than mixed’.

I like my t-shirts. But finding the good ones among the boring is used to be hard work – especially as so many of the better t-shirt sites do limited runs.

While pondering this problem about 3 months ago I decided to build a web app to collect the newest designs from some of my favoured sites and present them on one page.

This got built pretty quickly, so I added a url shortener, some voting mechanisms, a popularity chart, a hookup to twitter, and some nicer styling. Daytee was born.

Why post now? – The site just covered its thousandth t-shirt, from around 100 different, mainly indie, t-shirt brands.

Another web app of mine went live last week – Friending Topics. It’s free to use, you just log on with OAuth using your twitter account and the app does the rest.

Friending topics gives you a more specific list of trending topics, based 100% on your network. So for me I see lots of coffee, code, twitter and apps. I don’t see #musicmonday, Jay-Z or #todaysweirdspammyhashtag.

Feedback on Twitter has been really great so far – and about 50% of visitors to the site are signing up. It’s also been listed in a few of the better twitter app sites.

If you’ve used the service do let me know what you’d like me to add next, and consider rating or reviewing friending topics over at the listings on oneforty.com and twitdom.

You may have been confused somewhat by some oddly formed tweets appearing in my twitter feed on this page. Worry not, I haven’t gone mad.
I’m feeding my new project – datatoy.net. Datatoy is a service which turns tweets into charts. Tell it which coffee you drink, which tshirt you wear and what you have for lunch. It’ll turn all that into nice charts. Here’s my tunes page for the past few days. Fun Fun.