Information Is Beautiful

I probably won’t be entering any further contests, because despite being assured that my entry was received, even after the poblems with the entry forms, it appears my entry fell through the cracks, and either was not even considered, or just didn’t make it to the long list. This has been very frustrating, and has not been explained to me.

In parting, here are some suggestions for improving the contest.

1) Data should be very clean. This is a design contest. Designers should not be presented with a data set that is not ready for processing. Such things as having a field with mispelled enumeration values (e..g. “20th Centruy Fox”) and enumeration values that are supposed to be the same thing but are different e.g. “Happy Madison Productions” vs. “Happy Madison” make things harder on the contest entrants.

2) Your webform needs to accept “~” characters in URLs.

3) If you allow people to provide URLs for interactive designs, and you do not mirror the content (which is not possible with some sites that allow you to “create presentations online”) you should realize that they can often alter these designs after the contest deadline, and figure out how to approach that.

3a) If you hotlink to design entries when they are published, the service on which they are posted may not be able to handle the traffic — they may be using free accounts which bandwidth limits. If you intend to continue to hotlink to interactive designs, you might want to tell contestants that you will be doing this.

4) You should probably start giving some rough guidelines as to what formats you expect for the interactive challenge. Obviously you want something that can run in browsers, so the designs can be publicised on the websites, but would you be happy with a submission that only works on Opera on IOS devices, but nowhere else?