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Rustin Jessen

Doesn't play well with others.

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Free letterpress poster

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** Update *****************
The winning tweet and tweeter have been chosen. The winner has been notified via Twitter Direct Message, and I’m just waiting to hear back on if he/she is alright with me announcing it.

Huge thanks to all of you who entered! Really, I had so much fun watching this take shape today. I literally woke up this morning and said to my wife “I think I’m going to do a twitter contest to give away a poster”… she nodded, and I started this post. I had no idea I would have so much fun. I will absolutely do this again soon.

So, let’s talk about how this all turned out…
The first plan was to have my puppy and 9 month old son choose the winner. I hadn’t worked out exactly how, but I was picturing a pile of entries printed on bacon wrapped gram crackers… the rest is fuzzy.

With very few options in the clearly under-served market of bacon wrapped gram crackers, I was forced to adopt a slightly more boring approach.

There were a total of 51 valid entries. Each entry was given it’s own line in a spreadsheet in chronological order of when the tweet was made. My lovely wife pointed me to the slick and simple random number generator at random.org that gave me a random number between 1 and 51. The tweet that fell on that line number was deemed the winner.

While it didn’t hold quite the magic of a slobber war between the baby and the dog, it got the job done.

So my friends. Thank you again, and stay tuned for I will definitely be holding another contest soon! (but if you don’t want to wait for the next contest, just buy a poster!!!

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I’ve seen this done all over Twitter & thought it might be fun to try on this otherwise mundane Tuesday.

I’m offering signed and numbered Magic In Type Castle Poster to a random tweeter. To enter, just re-tweet the following…

I just entered to win a Magic in Type letterpress poster! Follow @rustin & tag #magicintype to enter. http://bit.ly/OQkh8

I’ll be choosing a winner randomly today (Aug 11, 2009) at 6:00PM Mountain Time! You need to be following @rustin, and have tweeted the above message before the end of the contest to be eligible.

Now… go tweet!

IMG_0612

Alpine Script

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Alpine Script

I originally saw Alpine Script over at the beautifully redesigned Letterhead Fonts, and today it crossed my path again in the MyFonts email newsletter.

I’m normally not a fan of brush scripts, but something about this face from Charles Borges de Oliveira catches me. I’m a fan.

Best music video ever

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As I mentioned in the about section of this site, there was a regularly updated blog in this space from 2004 until late 2007. All those nuggets of wonderfulness I created for the site are now archived, hidden away from the world.

I thought it might be fun to pull some of those bits out of the archive from time to time in a bit of a series I’m going to call… …wait for it… “From the Archive”

This little gem is from a post on June 17, 2006. I really think it stands on it’s own.

Please enjoy this wonderfully choreographed version of I wanna love you tender.

Mr. Blu Bird on my shoulder…

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Today, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Please say hello to Mr. Blu Bird! This little guy will sit on your shoulder and tweet happy little disney messages in your ear all day long.

mr_blu_birdWell, that last bit isn’t entirely true… but pretty close.

How this all came about

The story on this one isn’t particularly long or interesting. Sometime around the end of last week I thought it might be cool to check out the Twitter API. I didn’t have any particular project in mind, just wanted to see what it was all about.

Come to find out that the API is really awesome, and totally dead simple to use.

So I whipped up a little rails app after work and started to mess with things. All-in-all, development time spent on this was less than 6 hours. I spent a lot more time sorting out the details of it’s deployment. With the use of the new and totally awesome Feedzirra ruby feed library, deployment on a shared host just wasn’t going to be an option (though I did beat my head on that wall for the better part of Sunday night). I just couldn’t make all the custom gem requires play nice, so I reverted back to the always stellar Slicehost.

I swear, every time I’m frustrated with another host for some project or another, I end up back at Slicehost and they never disappoint. So with a new slice up, I had my little project deployed in under 30 minutes.

So, that’s really that. I just wanted to get my hands dirty with the Twitter API. I plan to add some cool features since I really had fun getting this far.

I hope you like it!

WED

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Was playing with the flickr button integrated in the new iPhoto last night (it’s the first time I’ve even logged into my flickr account in a year).

Thought I would share my little collection of images of the old maestro himself. (photos below the cut)
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Magic in pieces (of type)

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right_spire When I set out to create my type castle, I didn’t realize how much fun it would be to find interesting ways to approximate some of the finer bits of detail on Sleeping Beauty Castle. I’m not going to say I did everything the right way… and each time I open it up I find little bits to tweak before going to press, but things shaped up real nice & I’m quite happy with the result.

I thought it might be fun to use a few close up pictures to illustrate some of the detail. You can click on any of them for a larger view.

The first (Top right of this post) is an unique spire on the castle. One of the interesting points is the pattern the shingles make on the roofline where this spire appears. There is another interesting, but very different shingle pattern on the opposide side of the castle as well.

disney-crest

squirrel

There’s also some fun little details that probably won’t get much attention. This is the Disney crest, that is displayed above the drawbridge, and some cute squirrel gargoyles to the left and right.