When I read about layer tennis I thought: “okay, it’s a bunch of designer-bloggers doing their small clique thing again, to show off to the general public why they are so cool and why other uncool people can’t get into their club.”

Well okay that was a little harsh. The idea of layer tennis is that at a pre-determined time (usually 2pm Central time on a Friday), two contestants

swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley”

The file is published to online viewers and a third person provides commentary. Most matches are played in photoshop but there’ve been matches played in after-effects, flash and illustrator. It’s really a test of visual design skills in a short period of time rather than how well they know how to use photoshop filters.

There’s been 15 sessions so far, this weekend’s featured two simultaneous matches and it was touted as a “finale” so I’m not sure if it’s the last scheduled or what.

Do I understand it? Yes I do. And I’m pretty impressed with the creativity and ideas. This is from one of my favourites, between Veerle Pieters and Cindy Li on 11=Jan-08.

It was also interesting to read the participants’ thoughts on the match: Veerle Pieters | Cindy Li. Of course there was a large dose of inside jokes, as they know each other. Not a huge amount of technique commentary, mostly thoughts of how they arrived at each volley. Seemed like fun was had by all.