You may recall that we ran a competition to add to our collection of avatars a while back. Well, I’m happy to say that this great event gave us not one but four new avatars! I thought you all might enjoy this story, so here it goes:
We had great input from young patients when pilot-testing the BE community this spring. A need for different expressions in avatars, other hubs for identification, was one of the issues that surfaced from that test. Our users basically liked the existing avatars but wanted more choice.
Being on a shoe string budget we talked about how to accomplish this. Over at OurBricks our technology partners at Katalabs were running design competitions. The idea is basically that you state what you want made in a design brief, and put up a prize for the winner. We managed to scrape together $250 in prize money and the competition went live.
One week in, the first submission arrived. Quite a nice model that made us optimistic about the level of quality we could achieve. About a week later the submission period was over. After some deliberation we ended up going with OurBricks user TiZiana’s “Little Kid” model. There was a sense that her playfulness and very stylized approach would complement our existing avatar collection well.
TiZiana turned out to be a really good choice in ways that went beyond the high quality of her work. She liked our project so much that she totally free of charge made 3 additional skins as well as creating sit, idle and walk animations for them. This is an awesome contribution to the BE Community project and we are very grateful – and it’s also the reason I am able to present these four fully fledged members of the BE Community avatar family today!
Ps. As a nice bonus the runners up in the design competition were shared under an open license, so we are thinking to bring them in later, to add even greater variation to our avatar selection.
