Just over a year ago, the team here at Substance launched Logobama.com. It raised over $1,700 for the Obama campaign and most likely got him elected as President of the United States. Really.
Since the inauguration on January 20th, we’ve been thinking of what to do with the site. So on the almost-one year anniversary, we’re launching Logobama 2.0: bigger, better and tagalicious.
www.Logobama.com
Previously, all people could do on the site was create their own Logobama and download it for use as a photo or avatar for many of the social networking sites the kids are finding popular nowadays. After 35,000+ Logobamas were created, Flickr decided on December 4th to shut down the Logobama account because they found it in violation of their Terms of Use due to, “uploading anything that isn’t yours. Flickr reserves the right to deactivate your account without warning at any time.” So the site has been gallery-less since then. We still had all the Logobamas created on our server; the question was what to do with them.
We decided to see what WordPress could do with 35,000+ entries, so we used that as our Content Management System. Shaun and Cory wrote a nifty PHP script that checked the colors used in each Logobama, created a new post in WordPress, and tagged each post with the colors. Cory and I then ran some complex facial recognition software on each Logobama to determine if the photo used was of Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush. (The complex sofware was Cory and I looking at each logo and determining if it contained a photo with one of these figures, then tagging it appropriately. Yes, very complex.) The result is a database of color and political information that can be used to filter and browse the entire collection. Each Logobama is now on it’s own gallery page, allowing people to share, comment and download to their heart’s content.
Now that the data is tagged, we plan on doing some data visualization with the results such as popularity of color or political figure over time, most popular color combination used with each figure, and a timeline of events during the campaign and how they correspond to Logobamas created. We’re also thinking of doing a head-to-head battle where two randomly selected Logobamas are pitted against each other in a cagematch to determine logo supremacy. The tentative name for that is the “Change or More of the Same” Battle Royale.
Anyway, enjoy this slice of history. And if you’re into data and charts, you can check out the Logobama.com usage recap from right after the election.
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