JPG update: theme confusion resolved & new themes launched!
Posted by — 30 Mar 2009
Hello JPG!
I know it's been a bit longer than expected since my last post, so I wanted to send everyone a quick update on how things are going in the wonderful world of 8020, as well as explain what's been up with the themes and deadlines for JPG Issues 21 and 22.
Believe it or not, we're STILL in the process of reassembling the company and setting up the new office. (It's amazing too see how much work is required to healthily restart a company that's been shut down for nearly 90 days amidst a massive recession.) The good news is that we've made a tremendous amount of progress since I last wrote, and I'll be writing again in a few days to announce the new JPG team--which will contain some familiar faces along with a few new ones.
In the meantime, I'd like to explain what's been up with the themes for Issues 21 and 22--which many of you have been asking about. Because the shutdown of 8020 Media lasted longer than the original time allotted for submissions to Issue 21 themes, and because we didn't have any developers on staff at the time to fix this problem, we decided to re-open issue 21 themes as issue 22 themes in early February, when the issue 21 themes expired. Laura Brunow Miner posted about this on our blog back in early February.
But that quick fix caused some problems--like vote counts getting reset to 0 for all images originally submitted to Issue 21. Thanks to some crafty engineering work by our very own Devin Hayes, the problem has been recently fixed. The themes for issue 21 are now accurately labeled as such, and all votes cast for images submitted to themes in Issues 21 and/or 22 should be accurately accounted for. Wooo!
The one thing that still may seem weird are the deadlines for submission to and voting on Issue 21 themes, which have been extended by an additional 60+ days. This is just a stopgap measure to ensure that vote counts don't get hidden again before we have all of the resources in place to keep the theme cycle running smoothly. As soon as we have the full team in place, that deadline will be adjusted to more accurately reflect our new issue production schedule.
Given how stretched out that deadline has become, I wanted to make sure that a few fresh themes popped up on the site in the meantime--the first one of which is inspired by all of you! While JPG has been in restart mode, a group of enterprising JPGers started its own theme on Lemon Heads. The "submissions" (linked together by common titles) have been fantastic, so we've decided to make Lemon Heads its own official JPG Photo Challenge. Got a good Lemon Head photo? Go ahead and submit it! Or get inspired by what's already there, make one, and share it with the community!
We've also launched two other themes to tickle your fancy in this time of transition: Juxtaposition (to focus on comparison in compositions) and Bloom (to celebrate the incredible natural transformation that occurs this time each year). Hope you enjoy those themes too!
And that's the latest from JPG. As soon as there's more news to report I'll be sure to let you know, so stay tuned for more updates. Thank you for your patience and support in the meantime--as it means the world to all of us at JPG. And if you have any additional questions I can help answer, please don't hesitate to ask!
Cheers,
Seth
