All I want for Christmas is a new release of Holler Gram
In March we launched Holler Gram, an app that turns your iPad into a glowing sign and simultaneously tweets into a predefined hashtag. It was perfect for conferences and we only did it as a bit of fun - which is why we are amazed that it's now been downloaded 45,000 times.
It's still being used by people all over the world and of the many fascinating uses people have found for it, the most humbling is from Australia where a group of teachers got in contact with us to say they'd been using the app to teach deaf children.
Fast forward to 'now'...
We're almost ready to release a special Christmas version of the app - codenamed Holler Gram Seasons - for which we're stripping out the SXSW cards and adding a few special seasonal treats:
- A new set of Christmas themed cards - including some guest cards from special friends (sadly, we haven't quite got time to build a web service that will allow us to update these daily - but that's coming)
- Some UX enhancements based on some of the great feedback we got
- A Christmas themed rating feature - that we hope will allow people to rate aspects of their Christmases using a hashtag (e.g. #turkey, #presents, #familyrow, #stabbing)
- Integrated Twitter handling
- New memory management (ARC)
So far, we've invited a handful of our mates to make cards that we will include in the new version, but we thought we'd also like to throw this open and ask The Internet and Twitter if they'd like to contribute. The new version will be truly made by many.
This is where we need your help. If you are a designer or illustrator and you'd like to design a card to feature in the new app, please submit some artwork to be included in this new release. It's a fun project, and we'll obviously credit you and provide a link in the app,plus your design will be seen by potentially a fair few people. We'll also be making some of our own.
If this sounds like something you'd like to do, take a gander at what we included in the first release of Holler Gram to get a feel of how we use the messages.
What we are after:
Typographic/illustrative messages that have a Christmas theme to them (short catchy messages tend to work best)
Try and keep the colour palette to around 2-3 colours
Dimensions:
1024 x 768 (72dpi)
Deadline:
Mid-day 30th November
Submit your designs to: adam [at] madebymany.co.uk
We know it’s a pretty short deadline but we are sure there are some talented folks out there that may have some free time over the next few days that could give this a go. Maybe you even have something that you can quickly re-purpose...
We've also been working on an iPhone version - which works with Siri so that your spoken words appear as a glowing sign to be tweeted. It's pretty lush, but sadly we only have a bit of time with all this work stuff going on.. so that will have to wait until the new year as well.