campusflavor.com

From a technical perspective, Campus Flavor was nothing special. What made this project good is that it had a purpose. Campus Flavor was an attempt three college students made to improve their university's merchandise in a somewhat unconvntional manner.

Over a three month period two of my friends and I built a website that we would use to host what we had dubbed “design competitions.” Which would consist of a submission period, during which people could upload their designs, and a voting period during which people could vote for the designs that they liked. All with prize incentives.

We thought that such a system would allow us to deterministically select the designs that were the most popular with our school‘s student body. Designs that we could then sell to said student body and in some way, contribute to an improved campus culturea and create value for everyone.

The first competition didn't even go on for a week before we got a cease and desist letter from our school demanding that we stop our competition and stop infringing on their trademarks. Which, to be fair, they had a point. As much as I liked some of the designs that students were coming up with, they did use the school's name...

Even though most designs were not like the ones above, in that they were a lot more creative and—usually—much better none of them saw the light of day. Regardless, we still got 60 submissions and over 500 unique visitors in less than a week which I think is a pretty big win.

It was the first big project I worked on in a team, and just the lessons I learned from that made the project worthwhile. Well, that and all the compliments I get when I wear the only “CWRU Daddy” shirt in circulation.