Call to Action

So I say we’ll create them ourselves. I call a competition to create cool new background designs for Poken ID cards. Give me color!

The Rules

You create a design for a Poken ID card based on the standard Poken background.Upload it somewhere (you page, blog, flickr account) and link it here in the comments. You can create as many designs as you like but only your best one will count.

All designs have to be published under the Creative Commons License so that everybody is able to use them in their profiles.

The competitions ends on the 25. of April 2009 at 00:00 – so the 24. will be the last day. The winner will be chosen by me and announced the following weekend.

The Prices

As already mentioned in a preious post, I just received a Black Pack of Pokens. I’ll donate 3 of those for those who create the best designs: one Frankenstein, one Geisha and one Scream-Poken.

• The winner can choose one of the three mentioned Pokens he likes best
• The runner up can choose one between the remaining two
• The third price will be the remaining Poken

Examples

It would be nice if you would spread the word about this competition. Let’s color out profiles up together!

Here are some examples to get you going:

As you can see I did a very rough polishing job. The problem was that the form was heated too long (or too hot) and got pretty fragile. Even while filing it a little, the form developed fractures pretty quickly.

The dimensions of the form are also a tad too big, making the Poken hardware rattle inside.

So, as a conclusion: the result is not perfect, but promising. Let’s fix it in version 2!

In this case I’ll address another problem I see with the current Pokens: they’re cute and all but not really for business use. For that I think elegant, black, maybe leather. Something like a slightly oversized USB stick.

As base I use the Poken from Lift09 this time. It’s almost the shape of a Misslyn nail file so I took 3 of them and taped them together. Then I wrapped them in tin foil and applied the Fimo around it. After modelling it tightly around, you can just pull it off because of the tin foil. Don’t worry, you can easily scrape it out after baking it in the oven.

After the modeling it’s oven time. Don’t worry about fingerprints or irregularities – they will be filed off anyway. But beware: baked Fimo is pretty tough. You’d better have good sand paper. Or, if you’re like me (read: lazy), drive to somebody who has a grinding machine. So, more pictures soon.

So I went to town and looked around for some small, cuddly thing that would fit on my bag, wouldn’t make that much noise and that I would be confident to be able to hold a Poken. Also I wanted it to be fairly cheap as I didn’t know how customizing Pokens would turn out.

After some prodding around, I found a Dark Dudes figure. I first mistook it for a cat but they say it’s a bunny. Whatever, catbunny – it’s big enough to stick a Poken in it and it’s roughed up anyway, so one might easily overlook some scars that I’ll add to it while customizing.

The first task was to rip the poor thing open. However, be a bit careful and only cut the stitches – saves a lot of time as you don’t need to repait anything later.

After that I stuffed some wool back to act as a cushion for the Poken hardware, added the Poken and sewed it all back together. Pretty easy, actually. There were only three things to keep in mind:

1) The battery of a normal Poken is not attached to the small circuit board. So you have to make sure it stays in place. In my case, I just used the lower part of the hand to hold it together and taped it. This way, I also kept the USB-lash on the end.

2) Make sure you can see the status LEDs of the Poken. It’s no fun to high four someone just to realisze at home that it didn’t work.

3) If you want to put a Poken inside something you still have to worry about the USB port. Otherwise you’d still be able to high four people but would not be able to retrieve their data from your Poken. So either plan for easy retrieval of the Poken or make the USB port accessible. In my case, I just took a leg of the catbunny and put that around the USB jack. Then I sew back the leg on a small leash. Result: I can take the leg off and reveal the port and can’t loose the leg while doing so.

And that’s pretty much it. Of course you have to be a bit careful when handling the hardware of your Poken, but all in all it’s pretty straight forward. I now got a cuddly Poken to attach to my bag that doesn’t get on my nerves. It’s pretty tough and it fits. Of course I’ll curse the day when I have to replace the battery, but that will be fixed in the next model