OpenID Bounty flyer

An OpenID is a username that works across many different websites. If you post to several blogs, message boards, or wikis, you know what a pain remembering and managing dozens of usernames and passwords can be. If you have an OpenID, however, you only need one username and password for any site that accepts OpenID.

In July, 2006, the creators of OpenID announced they will award $5,000 to any web developer who incorporates OpenID in their website. We at Four Kitchen Studios had recently launched our own OpenID server at GetOpenID.com, so we were asked to help sponsor the bounty. We gladly accepted, and we also volunteered to design the literature to be distributed at OSCON 2006 and Wikimania 2006.

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Designing the flyer

As you can tell, OpenID is difficult to explain in only a few words. Unfortunately, there’s not much space on a 4” x 6” postcard, and most people ignore flyers and handbills entirely. We were faced with a dilemma:

Our flyer needed to be clear and concise enough to read and fully understand in less than two minutes, and
it needed to be attention-grabbing enough to actually pick up!

Faced with mixing the eye candy of advertising with the meat-and-potatoes of technical specifications—not to mention mixing metaphors—we decided instead to split them up entirely by “selling” the bounty on the front and explaining it on the back:

front and back of the OpenID Bounty flyer

The effect is a teaser—What? You’ll give me five thousand dollars?—that entices people to pick up the flyer and flip it over for more information.

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Delivering on a deadline

We had only a couple of days to design the flyer, write the copy, and get it approved by each sponsor. Thanks to effective communication and group coordination, 1,000 flyers were printed and ready for pickup at 11am the day of the conference—more than 2,000 miles away in Portland, Oregon.

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