It's official, 365 days & 1.5 billion App downloads later 148Apps has officially turned 1 Year old, Hurray!!!!!!! Now that you know, mark it on your calendar for next year, this year is your freebie but if I don't get a birthday card from you on July 16th next year we will sooo be fighting!
Seriously though, can you say "wow," just look at how much we have changed and grown from that very first Aurora Feint: The Beginning Review Jeff started us out with. We've reviewed hundreds of apps, added a staff of over a dozen writers, launched our sister site (148apps.biz), and have a Web Fourm section up and kicking, it's amazing, we are now easily the best gosh-darn iPhone review site this side of Mars.
We have you, our readers, to thank for all of it, so thank you. So in the spirit of thanks I want to announce a new contest. While I know we all love the App & ITMS Gift Card giveaways, we thought that this called for something special, Design your own GelaSkin. Let me explain, for those of you who aren't familiar with GelaSkins you definitely need to check out their site, they describe it as "Protection with style. Not Bulk." And it's true, their skins are ultra thin with amazing print quality.
Alright, I'm getting to the point, we are asking you guys to design a skin/logo for us. I'm not talking about a design for just a few skins, we'll be ordering tons of these things for different contest and promotional giveaways. Think about it, if you win your artwork could be on iPhones around the world, how cool is that! On top of that we'll obviously be giving you a free skin of your design and also your very own 148Apps T-shirt.
So heres how it's going to go down:
The Design
Your design can be of anything, App related or not, but it must be tasteful. You can get some great ideas and inspiration from the GelaSkins gallery page. Although it need not be directly related to iPhone apps we do ask that you work our 148Apps logo into it somewhere. If you check out the GelaSkins gallery you'll notice that many of the iPhone skins are cropped down from larger pictures, we can definitely do this as well, in the end the picture printed will need to be cropped to 1500 x 1500 pixels. You can grab a large version of our logo artwork here. You'll also notice that they recommend designing an optional wallpaper to go with the skin which if your skin is chosen we will post the downloadable artwork on our page.
Choosing the Winner
We're going to be stealing a page from the American Idol book here. The judging panel will consist of 3 148Apps representatives, each counting as 1 vote and then all of the readers will be allowed to vote on their favorite design. The most popular choice of the readers will count as 1 vote in the final panel. If there are enough submissions then there will be a semi final round where the designs are narrowed down to the top 3 to choose from and a new vote will be taken.
Viewing and Voting
There will be a submission gallery page setup where readers can browse through all of the submitted artwork for their favorites. The official voting and design submission procedure is still being discussed and details will be released soon.
Run Dates
While the contest is being announced today it will not officially begin until Monday, July 20th, 2009. Submissions will then be accepted until 11:59 pm Friday, July 31st, 2009. Votes will then be counted at 11:59 pm Monday, Aug 3rd, 2009. Results will then be announced on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009.
**One note about the artwork submissions. At 148Apps we fully appreciate artistic nature and encourage everyone to follow that nature and design anything they would like. But because of the wide demographic of readers we have we request that all submissions remain tasteful and reserve the right not to post any which we consider to be inappropriate or offensive. Thank you and have fun!
