Open Lab 2011 begins! Plus: About the buttons

The indefatigable Bora Zivcovik recently announced that the submissions for Open Lab 2011 are now up! So everybosy start hitting the button!

I’m pleased to have designed the submission buttons again for 2011. I’ve kept the same basic logo from Open Lab 2009, which I wrote about here.

For 2010, Bora said he wanted something intense. I had an image of bubbling lava in mind, and ended up with bright reds and yellows on the botton, which I thought worked well.

This year, my starting point was a post I’d written about over on Better Posters about contrasting colours. Blue and orange is a tried and true pairing for movie posters, so I thought, what the heck – I’ll try it. Steal from the best and all.

I almost used the concentric “pond ripple” background last year, but remembered it for this year. Initially, I was thinking about the ripples in terms of waveforms in physics(!), but in this final design, I liked that the blue ripples evoke cool water. It made a nice contrast to the “heat” I was going for on the 2010 button. The contrast was important, because one of my goals is to make each button very distinct. The new 2011 button needs to be immediately recognizable as being different than the others, because all three buttons up show up on many blogs.

I’m fairly happy with how these have turned out, and it is always very cool it see them on other people’s blogs. But although they have served well for the last three years, I hope that Bora and the Open Lab team will let me retire this design after Open Lab 2011 is published. I’d like to see something fresh for the Open Lab 2012 buttons, whether from me or someone else.