By Care

For the past three years, I have been hosting graphics challenges of one type or another. Since Laramie had to give up Grafica and it became a site run room, me and Dark have been taking care of it. Two years ago, I decided to do a month-long challenge that is hosted by Grafica, where I supply the prizes and we have fun with graphics.

So now every year in September, Grafica hosts its annual challenge. Every other day, challenges are posted in Grafica’s section of the ReVo message board. This year was no different. Starting on September 1st, I posted the first challenge, and it continued on until September 29th. At that time, the last challenge was posted and the designers had until October 1st to get their submissions in.

This year we had a turn out that was pretty awesome – nothing compared to the first year, but that’s to be expected, as it seems there’s an overall decline in both chatters and designers. The first year I ran this, we had ten designers in the challenge and only four finished. In 2015, we had nine designers, with only one, Hippolyta, finishing the challenges. This year, though, we had the best turn out yet, with fifteen initial participants. Four of those participants finished on time, and we also had an additional participant that completed all the challenges, though they didn’t make the October 1st deadline.
This year’s challenge winners were Jenna, Joy Naomi, malice, Rutger, and Aelurus.

The challenges this year were slightly different from the previous years. I wanted to try something new and I think it made for a good turn out. Some of the challenges this year were ReVo-related holiday graphics, fantasy genre avatars, horror/scary avatars, room-related banners, and Facebook cover images, just to name a few. This year, we also had to switch up the prizes as I honestly didn’t expect four people to finish the challenge – I was taking a look at last year’s numbers and based my expecttaions on that. So this year, I had a “Pick Your Prize” option for finishing the challenges. You can find the full list of prizes on the board. There were a few good ones picked! Ten paid resources, ten exclusive resources, a six-month membership, and a three-month membership were ultimately chosen.

The challenges will return next September, and remember, you don’t have to be a great designer to participate – just have fun with it!