Marian Bantjes' "serve" in her Layer Tennis match against Armin Vit, which featured in the first season

Kicking off today at 2pm Chicago time is the latest season of Layer Tennis, the online game which tests designers' skills to the limit....

Supported by Adobe Creative Suite 4, the game works as follows: Player One creates a single file of art within 15 minutes. This is placed in the 'web stadium', found here, where Player Two then has 15 minutes to creatively manipulate it (using Adobe tools, natch), before 'volleying' it back to Player One, who then re-manipulates it. Each player has five turns, creating a ten volley match. The match also has an online commentator giving his/her views on how the play is developing, and the audience gets to vote for who is the winner. It's all good fun, and serves as a nice piece of advertising for Adobe CS4 too.

Armin Vit's return volley

The first season of Layer Tennis took place in 2007-08 and included matches between Marian Bantjes and Armin Vit (their match is shown here - Bantjes emerged victorious), Aaron Draplin and David Nakamoto, and Scott Hansen and Rob Cordiner. Their matches can be viewed in full here.

Bantjes replies

First up in the 2009 season is graphic designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff playing against interactive designer Brendan Dawes. The commentator is John Gruber, whose match preview can be read online here. He describes the players as follows:

"This week's match is a doozy. On one side, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, a graphic designer's graphic designer, with a keen sense of branding. On the other, Brendan Dawes, "interactive" designer, which is just a fancy way of saying that he's just as likely to create a volley by writing code as he is by drawing...."

Let the games begin....

Vit

Bantjes

Vit

Bantjes

Vit

Bantjes

Vit's final volley. Sadly it wasn't enough to secure the game for him this time though