It has been a good six months since eight of us BADG authors put it all out on the line and designed a cover in real time for the world to watch (and rip apart). While the process was both rewarding and trying, we all learned a great deal.

We recently received word from STEP Inside Design’s new editor, Tom Biederbeck, that the March/April 2006 issue has officially become the Best-selling STEP cover in the magazine’s history!

Thank you to everyone (the readers, commenters, the STEP staff and the BADG design teams) for making this experiment a huge success. We also want to give a big thank you to Emily Potts for making our crazy idea a reality, and we wish her luck in her future endeavors!

If you couldn’t tell already, we rolled out a few upgrades to the site this weekend. Here are some of the enhancements we have made followed by a few more to watch for in the near future…

New About Us Page
We haven’t really updated our About Us page since we started the site, so it was overdue. The new page doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but hopefully it tells our story a little better.

New Author Page
Our author page now shows the most recent entries from each of our authors. It also has links to the sites of past contributors.

Comment RSS Feed
We now have a new feed that contains recent comments on the blog. It is great for tracking what is happening on BADG. Here is a link to the comment feed.

Most Commented On List
If comments are a measurement of a posts popularity then consider this a “Best Of BADG” if you will. You can see the top ten entries in the sidebar.

Top Commenters
You can see the top ten commenters in the sidebar, or visit this post to track the top 100.

Email Notification
Now you can sign up to have new posts delivered straight to your email. Similarly If there is a hot conversation on a post that you would like to follow, you can also sign up for email notifications on specific posts.

Tighter Spam Filters
In the recent months you may have noticed that a few spam comments have snuck past our filters and appeared on the site. Thanks to a couple new plugins and minor tweaks our site should be spam free. The only downside is that there is a chance that your comment might not appear right away. I apologize in advance if this happens to you.

If you think that is impressive, check out what we will be implementing in the near future:

New Podcasts
There are some great episodes of Be A Design cast in the works with some amazing guests. I heard a rumor that September is Pentagram month.

A New Blog Exclusively For BADG Readers
I don’t want to give away too much on this one, but if you are interested in being a BetA tester for this, send us an email and I will see what I can do.

BADG T-shirts
We have a T-shirt design ready for production and are just trying to figure out how we are going to print and distribute them.

New Author Search
Soon we will be making a worldwide search for a couple more amazing authors. Again, if you are interested, send us an email.

Sponsorship
We haven’t sold out yet, but we are exploring the option of sponsorship. Apple? Adobe? Probably not, but we definitely want to find a sponsor that fits who we are. If you can connect us with a worthy sponsor, don’t hesitate to send them our way.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to be able to stay up to date with everything that is happening on BADG. For those of you who don’t take advantage of our RSS feeds (To learn how to use our RSS feeds, click here.) you now have the option to be notified of new posts on BADG by email. Enter your email in the box below to receive an email every time BADG is updated. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Click on the link provided in the email and you will be notified every time we make a new post!

You will also notice a new box in the comments section that you can click to be notified by email every time a comment is added to that particular post. It is the perfect way to stay on top of those hot conversations.

After a long wait (and a brush with the law), we have finally updated the BA photos at the top of the page. If some of the newer visitors are not aware of our ever changing identity, here are a few posts that explain it a little more in depth (Feedback on our BA collection, Our updated photos, Photo pool on Flickr) and here is the entire collection. .

Fellow BADG author Drew Davies took most of these new BA photos on a trip to the Cayman Islands, but we also have some submissions from Adrian, Kyle Heinemann, Clint Carlson, John Sanders, Gregory Golem and I. As always, feel free to upload your own BA photos to our Flickr pool and we will eventually add them to the collection.

And now, on with the story of my run in with “the law” for this very blog.

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We have a bit of exciting news to share with you. Be A Design Group and its authors will be designing the next cover for STEP Inside Design magazine. This will work in much the same way as the Design Off. We will be posting initial concepts and revisions all the way up to the approved design. We welcome your feedback and participation – making BADG even more of a collaborative effort. Check back after the new year for more information. The initial concepts will be posted on January 4.