Calling all goblins and ghouls – it’s contest time!

I love Halloween. It’s easily my favorite holiday. I like Halloween decorations, lights, and colors, and the people who take the time to make their yards look like haunted houses. I’m also a fan of the day after Halloween, with the half-price sales – that’s when I add to my collection of Halloween stuff. You can bet I’ll be the first inside the store this Saturday morning, ready to scoop up all kinds of great things, running around like a kid in a candy shop.

But don’t get me started on stores these days. The past few years, right alongside the Halloween gear, they put out the Christmas decorations. This year, it was still September when they started stocking the shelves with Christmas lights. It’s too early – and it’s enough to put me in a really Grinchy mood and ruin my Halloween cheer. So then I decided – why not throw a costume party to keep me in the Halloween spirit (ha! spirit – get it)?

And that’s where you come in. Sure, we could throw a party here at the office, but how would you get to join in? So what about a costume party with a twist; something with, say, a little competition added in and a chance to win an awesome prize? Well, boys and ghouls, if that sounds like fun to you, join me for the details after the jump.

Great – I knew you’d be interested! So here it is, the first ever Ilium Software Worldwide Costume Contest: we have here at Ilium Software something called the “Ilium Guys”. They’re the two people-shaped “i’s” in our logo. A while ago, Marc decided to dress them up a bit just for fun, like so:

Well, I’m sure you can guess what I’m getting at by now. We can’t let our little Ilium Guys go without a cool Halloween costume to wear. But we need your help! So, from now until Halloween (this Friday) at noon EST, you get a chance to get creative, have fun, go all out, and dress up our Ilium Guys in whatever costume you’d like to see them in. I’ll include a couple different types of “blank slate” Ilium Guys at the end of the post that you can use as your canvases – they’re bigger than the ones you’d find on our site.

What’s that? You say you didn’t go to fashion school, you’re not artsy or you don’t have a cool graphics program to use? Ah, that’s okay. I’ll post my rendition of Ilium-Guy-as-Frankenstein in the first comment below, which I threw together in about 15 minutes in Photoshop. That should be enough to make anyone feel better about a lack of artistic flourish. I bet you could use the Paint program, Google some images and super-impose them, or print out the logo and use Magic Markers, then scan the image back onto your computer. In fact, I’d really like to see something done in crayon – that would be awesome.

All right, let’s wrap this up (ha! wrap it up – mummies – get it?) and dole out the rules so you can all get to designing. Here they are, the official rules and important stuff you’d better read before entering:

1. There are two different kinds of Ilium Guy images you can dress up. One is a single guy, the other is our whole logo, a little smaller, like Marc’s Star Wars image above. The thumbnails are below; click on either to open it full-size in a new window. You should be able to right-click the image, save it to your computer, and then away you go!
               
2. You’ll be uploading your image in your blog comment. At the bottom of the comment form, you’ll see a link telling you to click and add your image. Your image needs to be online somewhere for you to be able to submit it. So, upload it to Flickr (or whatever it is you crazy kids are using these days) or anywhere else you can, then click the link on our comment form, enter the URL to your image, and it will show up.
3. I’ve turned on comment moderation this week, since this contest requires image uploading. We just need to make sure that no one tries to upload any malicious code to our blog. Now, I know you guys would never do such a thing, but it is Halloween time, and there are evil things that go bump in the night who might try to upload something dangerous.
4. I’ll go through and approve comments a few times a day, so please just be patient if you don’t see your comment approved right away.
5. Am I forgetting anything else? Oh, yes, the prizes of course! I bet you’d like to hear what’s up for grabs. Each winner will get to choose between a $10 iTunes gift card or a $10 Amazon gift card. And in keeping with that theme, there will be 10 winners chosen from all the entries. You can enter as many times as you’d like, but you can only win once. Like I said earlier, the contest closes at noon EST on Halloween (this Friday) and I’ll announce the winners sometime that afternoon.

So good luck to everyone – the Ilium Guys are excited to see what they get to wear this Halloween. Make them creepy, make them kooky, make them mysterious, spooky, altogether ooky – whatever it takes! Have fun and…

UPDATE: Doug over at Tilt Mobility (check out his awesome contest entry below) has just upped the stakes (ha! stakes – vampires – get it?) with a little added incentive of his own to our Halloween contest. If you dress up our Ilium Guys here and drop a comment over on his site, you’ll also be entered to win one of two Triforce Styli that he has to give away! Read the complete details and comment at Tilt Mobility. Thanks Doug!