I’ve actually be having a lot of fun thinking about this and getting ready to move into planning and design.
First and foremost, I’m going to use this as a learning exercise to teach myself some new technology, so don’t expect a very rapid turn around. I figure I’ll either build the site using Ruby on Rails or Django, so that’ll be cool. I think I have the option of using PostreSQL on the backend, so I might do that, as well. (Not that I expect this to be a big test of a database…)
As for features, I think we want the following for submissions: tagging, commenting, searching, ranking, and maybe a “favorites” pool (favorites could work as a binary ranking system… the more a submission is “favorited”, the more popular it is…). Ideally there would be an RSS/Atom feed for the latest submissions.
Users need profiles with optional links to blogs, Flickr accounts, MySpace pages, etc.. They could also have some semi-social functionality like “buddies”, and so forth.
Hopefully we can run out some t-shirts/stickers/whatev from the best submissions. There’s some vague potential for some actual goods, but that’s nowhere near reality at this point.
What else do we want/need?
I hope you are including a “knuckle tatt generator” feature: the user types in the 8-letter combo and picks a font, and then you render it on a photo of someone’s hands to show how it would look…emailable to the user’s friends of course.
Jenn has a great point. Make it interactive like at Dafonts.com wherein you can test out what MUFF HUNT would look like in fancy Gothic letters. Possibly radio buttons with 5 or 6 fonts, and the eight letters in a box below? That has to be difficult, though.
It’s a bit hard, yeah. Plus there’s the fact that fonts like that tend to have all kinds of copyright and licensing garbage attached to their use.
Maybe version 2.0 will have that…
Weird that I just found this at boingboing - seen it?
That’s actually what got this started. I omitted the link from the original post for a reason, though.
I actually went back and checked your post for it too. Count me as naive and non-tattooed.