UDesignIt Card

The UDesignit Travelbug's goal is to have the geocacher who finds it pick the next subject for the Yrium Cards - The Next Generation trading cards.

Secondary goal is to stay in the greater San Diego region as SD Rowdies and The Fat Cats probably wouldn't be able to make a trading card for someone they've never heard of.
 

Yrium made this travelbug in order to allow the current owner of the card to pick who THEY want to have as the next victim... Ah, he meant subject in his line of trading cards. Yrium passed away in 2004 and FlagMan has now adopted this TB.

You definitely have to pick the subject to grace the next card. This can be yourself, another cacher, a cache, a series of caches, a travel bug, a coin -- basically anything relating to Geocaching. If you've seen one of YRIUM's previous cards (YRIUM's PALS, UDESIGNIT Series, Yrium Memorial Series, etc.) you know what I'm talking about. The focus for this particular series is on cool subjects and cool graphic design.

You need to specify the subject matter for the card and either come up with your own design in Photoshop (.psd) format, or describe your ideas to FlagMan and he will work on the design for you.

Trivia: The elements making up the figure on the card came from a variety of sources. In no particular order...

GX Logo - a geocacher named Leatherman designed the big G with the X in it that Yrium put in the top right/bottom left corners. Yrium added the wrench.

Hat Icon - Stork did Yrium the best favor ever when he emailed him the hat and stick picture.

Geocaching hat - Yrium cut the hat off a picture of Beeque. I bet he never felt a thing.

Arm with Bamboo staff - Yep, that's Vagabond alright.

Pants and legs - Its Shoeless Joe's moniker... Maybe you saw it inside a certain peanut butter jar?

FlagMan's avatar has been added at the bottom right.


Some design tips: Yrium and I have learned a few things since we've been doing these cards.

1) Faces are only as good as the initial picture available. If the initial picture is blurry or hazy its a sure bet the card will be too. Also, It always looks better on the monitor than it does printed out.

2) More is not always better. The 'busier' a card is, chances are the items in the picture will have to be smaller and thus not easily visible on a 2-1/2" X 3-1/2" card.

3) Lots of whitespace on a card makes it look cleaner and sharper.

4) 'IN' jokes are cool. Some people have the best time trying to figure out what the heck is going on in the picture.


NOTE: You can either keep the TB Card you found as a souvenir (in which case FlagMan will "grab" (virtually) the TB from you, make a new physical card and release it into an appropriate local San Diego cache for the next lucky cacher to find) or you can wait for FlagMan to give you the green light and then place the TB card yourself in an appropriate cache of your own choosing. Please keep in mind that there are many other cachers out there waiting for a chance to find this TB, so placement of the bug should reflect creativity, originality, geographical diversity, and just plain fun. "Hand-offs" or other means of obvious manipulation should be avoided.