Yes I have a new rule named after me. Here’s a long story of how it came into being.

Part I.
There’s this fantastic design agency (and more) in Chicago called Coudal Partners. They have a website which I read on a daily basis. The reason for the daily-ness is Fresh Signals, great links to various and sundry things on the web. Many of them are related to art, design and photography which just happen to be passions of mine.

Part II.
A month or so ago, they sent out a newsletter, aka Infrequent Mailing to their mailing list. I just happened to be waiting for an email that afternoon, so I had my email checking for new mail every minute. So, I was alerted as soon as the newsletter arrived and promptly read through it. At the end, it said to reply to the email with the line "I like free stuff" and the first three replies would win a poster. Not just any poster, a very colourful, fun, hand-screened, limited-edition poster that I had had my eye on for quite some time. So I replied. Shortly thereafter receiving an email from Jim Coudal, telling me that I was the first and commenting on how quick my reply was. I have since received the poster and absolutely love it. I’m looking forward to our move later this winter when I’ll be able to set up a real home office and can display it properly.

Part III.
Jewelboxing. One word for a sweet disc-packaging system. I had the opportunity to use Jewelboxing for the video yearbook case that I designed for Trinity Western University last spring, as well as the case for our Kenya DVD Slideshow that I put together this past fall. I also have a personal project coming up that I was planning on using Jewelboxing for. Coudal created the Jewelboxing system. Granted, they didn’t actually design the incredibly cool cases, however one of the best parts of the system is the pre-perforated inserts that they did design and create. And the easy-to-use templates that come along with it all.

Part IV.
Jewelboxing is celebrating their one-year anniversary. In doing so, they decided to run a contest. The contest came in the form of the next Infrequent Mailing, where the rules were laid out. Basically you had to go on a virtual scavenger hunt, searching through the hundreds (thousands?) of previous Fresh Signals entries for answers to 8 questions that they asked. It ended up being a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. After nearly an hour of searching for answers, I called Isaac, one of my coworkers, and we decided to take advantage of the fact that our jobs are flexible enough that we can take time off and make it up later, whenever we want to.

Using the power of iChat, we worked together trying to find all 8 answers. At one point we had seven and a good guess for the other, and we almost sent it in, but then decided to both give it one more go. All in all it took both of us about two hours of solid sleuthing to find all 8 answers. Yay for teamwork and collaboration. (I made sure to carefully read the rules to make sure that collaboration wasn’t outlawed – it wasn’t as far as I could tell.)

Then the wait began. We waited and waited for the results to be announced, hoping that maybe we had made it in the top three. Then a few days later, they announced that there was still room for a winner – we worried that maybe we had gotten something wrong. We checked back over our answers and were pretty confident in all of them. Fingers crossed then, for first or second…the wait continued.

Today, finally, the winners were announced. Oh the fame! And thus began the Shawn Kelley rule. From here on out, winners are only allowed to win once (It’s okay for losers to win more than once, though). Seems fair enough. So, even though I will no longer be participating in their contests, I will continue to read Fresh Signals every day and I’ll eagerly read each new Infrequent Mailing. Maybe someday my rule will even be up there with Murphy’s Law – after all, as cool as the jewelboxes are, it’s not everyday that you get a rule named after you!