A hush falls over the small crowd of spectators. Minutes tick slowly by. Suddenly, a player volleys. The announcer cries out, "Rush has ditched his first direction and turned around with a colored filter, practically obliterating the layers underneath."
Welcome to Photoshop tennis, an online contest in which the players are Web designers, a Photoshop document is the ball, and a send button is the racquet.
Courtside seats are available to anyone who logs on during a live match, and instant replays are always available.
The rules of the game are simple.
In Photoshop tennis, two designers send an image document back and forth, adding one layer for each turn.
The document is posted to a website in real time, accompanied by announcer commentary.
The match ends pretty much whenever the designers decide they've had enough. Sometimes it's hours later, at which point "audience members" vote on a winner.
Photoshop works using a system of layers -- background, foreground and innumerable layers in between, each containing a different element of the image.
The prize?
It's a great way to show off your chops," said its inventor Jim Coudal, founder of Coudal Partners, a Chicago advertising and design agency.
Coudal, who describes the game as an "international, cooperative, quasi-competitive, independent thing," came up with the idea this summer on a slow Friday afternoon while he and an online pal "whacked a file back and forth" to kill time.
Soon after, Coudal was contacting designers he knew and respected to play in official matches.
With four test matches and four official matches completed, Coudal's site now gets around 1,000 visitors a day, mostly folks from ad agencies and design shops, according to server logs.
Designers are now contacting him, wanting to know how they too can play.
"We get amazing comments from people," Coudal says. "It's only four weeks old, but people are already convinced on what is the right and wrong way to play it."
Like many other sporting events, Photoshop tennis was postponed following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast. The next game is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 28.
Voters, he says, prefer a back-and-forth that tells some sort of story versus, say, a match that delves into more high-minded explorations of typography or color.
Easier said than done.
"It was fun, but it was also hard and frustrating," said designer Michael Schmidt about a recent match, which he won. "You're sitting there waiting for someone to fuck up your graphics. Someone is pulling a design in one direction, and somebody else is trying to pull it in another direction. He can take something you've worked on for two hours and he can kill it in a spate of two seconds."
Competition is abundant in the design field, where critical recognition is important resume fodder.
But in the competition for jobs, designers are not fighting an opponent so much as hoping what they've done is better than everybody else's.
Photoshop tennis gives designers a truly new experience -- the chance to kick butt in real time.
"It is about winning, making the opponent forfeit the game," explains Schmidt, who runs his own design website, k10k. "It's cool in that we have nothing like that. When we have websites, we're all very supportive of each other."
If the game contains any meta-message, to use design parlance, it is a tribute to Adobe Photoshop's market saturation. The software has 4 million users worldwide, according to the company.
"It doesn't seem like there's any software as ubiquitous as Photoshop," said designer Rosecrans Baldwin, who has announced several matches. "People never really consider that there are other tools for graphic design out there."
The software's worldwide popularity means that designers from around the globe can communicate, visually, using a common language.
"I think the larger issue is that the separation of physical and geopolitical space between like-minded individuals is getting less and less all the time," said Coudal. "Games like this allow relationships in this odd modern online environment to grow."
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