fun

This newspaper dress contest was too fun not to pass on.

When I was in high school (which wasn’t that long ago, eh hem, a decade), I remember some kids entering a contest for designing and wearing duct tape prom attire. This takes it to a whole other, way more awesome level.

The Detroit Free Press encouraged local students to design prom dresses made from newspapers for the chance to win $500. And what the local girls came up with is nothing short of awesome.

Users can select their favorite dress and rank them to help determine the $500 winner.

The Freep says it received more than 20 entries. You can check out the photo gallery of the top eight newspaper dressmaker finalists here. And you can vote on your favorite until midnight Thursday.

This is a great example of a way for a newspaper to engage its readership — especially its young readers — and promote the print product in a creative way. They tie it together nicely with the smooth voting/ranking mechanism and online contest. Innovative and fun for participants and other readers.

Thanks to Poynter for pointing this contest out. They also have some fun links to other newspaper fashions, including this gallery of newspaper dresses.

Author and journalist Susan Orlean (left) has written two nonfiction pieces that have been turned into films. She’ll discuss her new book, Rin Tin Tin, in Mediabistro’s first online Literary Festival & Workshops starting July 16. Other speakers include Rebecca Skloot, Jason Boog, and Jason Allen Ashlock. Register now.

Ever thought you could come up with better headlines, photos or layouts for a website? Now you can prove it with a fun new tool: NewsJack.

The super easy to use tool lets users customize everything from the formatting, to the links, to the text, to the photo, to well, everything — on any website. Give HuffPo the conservative slant you always dreamed of, or endorse Obama on the Fox News site. I resisted the urge to plaster the New York Times homepage with LOL Cats. But In this quick silly mock-up, I did slip in a photo of my dog reading the local sports page.

I took a screen grab, but you can also publish your piece for the world to view your revisions. Of course, you could use this for serious purposes, such as mocking up your own page to see how a change would look. But it’s also completely fun to play with headlines and placement on other sites. The real beauty is in the ease of use. In about 10 minutes you can completely redesign your favorite (or least favorite) sites.

Of course, this tool will forever make me even more skeptical of rogue headlines allegedly screen grabbed on any news site.

According to the site, NewsJack is a project of MIT’s Center for Civic Media. You can follow the creators on Twitter @news_jk. And share your creations with us, @10000words.

Have you ever wished Facebook looked a bit more like Pinterest? Now it can thanks to a new Facebook app called PinView.

To use PinView, you simply have to log into Facebook and  authorize the app, which just launched today and is still in beta. Once it’s turned on, so to speak, PinView turns your wall, newsfeed, photos and videos all into something that resembles a Pinterest board. Everything is divided into rectangles and definitely makes Facebook an even more visual platform than it already is.

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If you liked The West Wing or The Social Network and you’re a journalism junkie, then mark your calendars for the debut of Aaron Sorkin’s next HBO premiere: The Newsroom. The trailer is embedded below:

The HBO website describes the show as “a behind-the-scenes look at the people who make a nightly cable-news program.” They elaborate:

Focusing on a network anchor (played by Jeff Daniels), his new executive producer (Emily Mortimer), the newsroom staff (John Gallagher, Jr., Alison Pill, Thomas Sadoski, Olivia Munn, Dev Patel) and their boss (Sam Waterston), the series tracks their quixotic mission to do the news well in the face of corporate and commercial obstacles-not to mention their own personal entanglements.

Unlike your typical newsy-type series that is completely detached from how media actually work today, The Newsroom is different — at least if the first trailer is any indication. Momentary snippets of the trailer show video being shared on YouTube, written about in Facebook status updates and posted on The Huffington Post. Maybe this show could be a refreshing, (more) realistic depiction of our industry.

The New York Times reports that the new series will debut on June 24.

It’s Wednesday, hump day. The week’s half-over or half-begun, depending on how optimistic you’re feeling today. Either way, it’s probably about time you had a little lunch-time diversion.

So today I present a feast of fun finds I’ve seen linked around the journosphere (and related areas) recently. Hopefully, you can find a few minutes to waste, err, peruse, them when you need a creative boost. There’s something for everyone, whether your “thing” is for words or photos or design. Have fun!

1.) Play the NYT “stupid game” and destroy their story page with the flash, keyboard-controlled triangle. The game is meant to play off the content of the piece, which is all about why we love to play stupidly addictive games, such as Angry Birds.

2.) What if Facebook was Invented in the ’90s? This is what it would look like.

3.) I Shot The Serif. (But I did not shoot the sans-serif.) This fun, fast-paced game tests your typography knowledge and how well you can pick your serifs from your sans-serif.

4.) If type isn’t your forte, how well do you know your way around the color wheel? This game, Color, gives players a limited amount of time to precisely pinpoint the given hue or saturation or the complimentary colors. It’s sort of maddening, but it’s also sort of addicting to see how precise you can be.

5.) Speaking of color… The color of “newspaper” is a lot prettier than I expected. This simple site allows you to search for a name, item or place — whatever really — and it compiles a composite image of recent Flickr photos with that phrase. The composite is a colorful image supposedly showing “the color of” that item. Generally, the colors don’t stray too far from each other (except for items very heavily favoring one color, say “blue” or “grass”), but it’s still sort of fun to see how different images/themes combine to affect the mood of the final image.