The Style Contest: Deadline for Designs

Just a friendly reminder -- there's $17,000 in prizes being awarded as part of the The Style Contest, and the deadline is this Monday, June 5. We're thrilled to see all the great designs submitted so far, but also know that some of the best work designers do happens on deadline. If you're not done with your work yet, or you're on the fence about wanting to win four thousand dollars in cash, then here's your wake-up call: It's time to get to work!

We're really proud at Six Apart to be sponsors of this kind of design contest. This is especially true because design is in our blood.

We think your work as a designer is valuable. With everything we do, design isn't an afterthought, where it's just "prettying up" stuff that the programmers have thrown over the wall. We know you feel the same way, and we want to make sure the experience most people have with the web isn't just an accident that happened to get converted into HTML.

Design is in our blood.

Our co-founder is a designer. Ever been asked to do another comp on spec for someone who thinks designs should be free? Our team at Six Apart has worked in the real world, too, and it informs what we do. Instead of hoping to "design" something after the fact, we take designers into consideration, and try to empower both web design experts and everyday blogger to customize and personalize their sites.

And by building for Six Apart platforms like Movable Type, you're buliding on the best plaform for web designers. There's an amazing community of your peers using the same tools as you: Names you know, or at least sites you recognize: Doug Bowman, Heather Armstrong, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, Todd Dominey, Derek Powazek, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, Cameron Moll, Greg Storey, Heather Champ, Jason Kottke and hundreds more of the most influential and innovative designers on the web use Movable Type to power their blogs.

It's not just individuals -- some of the most influential businesses in design and usability use Movable Type as part of their set of tools. Our friends at 37signals, Adaptive Path, Mule Design, Veer, Blue Flavor, and Behavior are just some of the many design or user experience firms using Movable Type to publish their own sites.

And design firms aren't the only people in the design community who rely on Movable Type to build their businesses. Whether you want to keep up with Ben Goodger of Firefox fame or you want to follow dozens of bloggers at Adobe (including the former Macromedia folks), the people who make the tools you use ever day are using the same blogging platform as you. So if you want to know what's coming next for Photoshop or Flash or Dreamweaver, you can just read up on their work on their blogs.

In short, you're in good company.

And just as importantly, we put our money where our mouth is. Be the grand prize winner, and you can have $4000 of it. By sponsoring efforts like The Style Contest, and by investing in the technology that lets you reach millions of bloggers around the world with one set of designs, we're investing in having better design on the web. We're also trying to make sure that designing blogs stays challenging and interesting, so that working on blogs doesn't become the next equivalent of just cranking out another 468x60.

We'll be talking more about our commitment to good design and to our community going forward, but first we can't wait to see everyone's submissions on Monday. Good luck!