In honor of a new season of Layer Tennis starting today—and what promises to be an amazing match between Khoi Vinh and Nicholas Felton, I dug up something from the archives.

What is it? It’s my “Photoshop Tennis” match from Summer 2001. The 4th ever match, I think. All traces of its existence seems to have disappeared from the web. The Coudal link is long-dead and even the Internet Archive’s copy of it is now gone. :-(

Ah, but who cares. The folks playing Layer Tennis these days would totally kick my ass. But I did want to put this up for posterity. So here it is.

Here’s rundown of volleys between myself/XPLANE and the good folks at Quorporation in Amsterdam. Was it Folkert? Ah, I forget.

1. I served. Photo taken somewhere in rural Missouri. On film. I forget where the rabbit came from.
2. Quorporation volleys back, taking my rabbit and multiplying it like… rabbits!
3. The bunnies and the “Smile!” are too nice. I return, sending back an XPLANE-bred hatebot and getting rid of most of the first two volleys.
4. They take the robot and quoink it.
5. Information? I gots the information for ya. I wrote the book on Photoshop Tennis back in the day, sonny! I also pop a little plug for the now-deceased RPM blog on this quickly mocked-up book cover a la O’Reilly.
6. They riff on the idea of productizing things and comes back with an excellent recap of previous art. I love this one.
7. My next return is weak—too scattered. It too featured some cool art from my friends at XPLANE, but probably too much of it, and not very thought out. I tried to bring back a little bit of everything but it didn’t work.
8. My competitor calls me on it.
9. I come back and say, “Oh yeah, remember the rabbit?! He’s on TV now!” Broadcast success.
10. I liked the final scene from Quorporation, but the judges didn’t. I think they felt it was too self-promotional, but that’s not how I took it.

In the end I won. In the spirit of company against company, I used some artwork from my fellow XPLANERS Brian Kaas, Jeff Wilson, and Dan Zettwoch. Thanks guys!

It was a lot of stressful fun (you were only allowed 10 minutes to send back your serve). The one thing I remember promising myself was to never completely wipe away a scene and simply throw in a new design with no context or reference, which is why I guess my slide 7 failed.

Layer Tennis is hard. It can be pretty annoying seeing all the #lyt tweets calling a volley “lame” or something similarly dismissive. It’s a serious brain/fingers workout—you end up with tennis elbow in your head.

But it’s fun. So here’s to another season of Layer Tennis.

And here ends our tour of one vintage match of Layer Tennis. It might not be much to look at compared to the brilliance of Shaun Inman or Chris Glass, but hey, it was the old days.

Thanks for years of fun, Jim and everyone at Coudal Partners.

bk