Random Snowflakes: your design. millions of cans.

When I first saw the Pepsi can looking like that, I went "Huh? Is it Pepsi's silver anniversary or something?"
But, no, I told myself. It's way past their silver anniversary.

It's waaaaaaaay past their silver anniversary, actually. And, no, they did not decide to make their cans be plain silver. (Although the silver can looks cool in its own way, yeah?)

They're having a Design Our Pepsi Can contest. As the contest name implies, Pepsi is having the something-hundred-million citizens of the United States make their own Pepsi Can designs. The winning design will be used for Pepsi cans nationwide. As their tag line for the contest goes, "Your design. Millions of Cans." The winning designer, by the way, gets $10,000. Awesome, huh?

The not-so-awesome part of this, though, is that contestants have to be residents of the US. Awwww, too bad for me. If you're a US citizen, though, then good for you.

But, if you're not in the States, do not despair! We can still have our fun.

The contest website, is a flash site that, aside from giving us info about rules and voting, lets you design your own Pepsi can. The canvas is there for you to paint on. You can use from the colors on the upper left corner to change your background or decal colors. There are at least 30 (I think) decals to choose from on the bottom part of the tool, and you can resize, rotate and flip them using the options below the color pallette. You can also click on paint to... well... paint. Hehe. (On a side note, the instructions are there on the page. I turned it off so I can see what I was doing.)

Here's a note: the tool is sorta like Photoshop that the decals are treated like layers. You can change them any time you want. BUT you can't change the layer order. If you paint a decal first, it's going to be underneath everything you paste on there. So work on the background images first before pasting in the decals that you want on top.

Another note: you have to drag and and drop the decals onto the canvas, not double-click them. AND if you want to rotate the decal, click on it, and then click-drag the rotate tool, not the object itself. Hehe. I kept trying to rotate it like I would do it in Photoshop. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how the tool worked.

If you want to see what your design looks like, you can hit "preview design". Another page will load to show you what your Pepsi can's going to look like. You can rotate the can to see it from all angles.

If you're not satisified with your design, you can always hit edit, and you'll be taken back to your canvas.

If you want, you can also download the Pepsi can template and make your own design off-site. And then you can upload your design and preview it and stuff.

If you're from the States, you can save your work on-site. Doing so, however, submits your entry. So make sure you're done with your masterpiece. Oh, and make sure you submit before May 10th!

There's one other cool thing you can do on the site: you can view the entries! Some entries are really cool. It's fun to browse through them. ^________^

Yeyness. So head on over to http://www.designourpepsican.com to enjoy designing and browsing! I know I did.