Many design fans are of course already familiar with Jim Coudal and his Chicago-based Coudal Partners ad and design agency; along with being a supporter of some great creative people out there (including CCLaP favorites Kevin Guilfoile, Jason Kottke and 37Signals), they also maintain a highly addictive website as a place to "showcase the agency's abilities, provide a forum for creativity and experimentation in writing, design and commerce and to test new technologies and tools." Now Coudal is sponsoring a series of live online events sure to be a big hit among designers, called Layer Tennis; think of it as a poetry slam perhaps, except in this case with two squinting, pale Photoshop experts battling it out. (Actually, that's a pretty good description of a typical poetry slam as well.)

Basically, every Friday afternoon (Chicago time) two artists from around the world are going to be pitted against each other; one is given an image at the beginning of the bout and has 15 minutes to embellish it in any way they want, before then sending it to their competitor to do the same. Each iteration of the image will then be posted at the Coudal site in real time as the competition takes place; a well-known writer will be asked each week to provide "color commentary" at the site for each round as well. At the end of ten "volleys," then, the people who have been following along at the site get to vote for a winner, with that winner getting I believe not much more than bragging rights.

The first Layer Tennis match is tomorrow, as a matter of fact, starting at 2pm Chicago time (GMT -6; so in other words, 3pm in New York, noon in Los Angeles, 8pm in London and a bleary 6 o'clock Saturday morning in Australia); the first two designers to go head-to-head will be Shaun Inman and Kevin Cornell, with commentary provided by John Gruber. Of course, this being Coudal, all kinds of options have been created to help you follow along; on top of the web page for the project, Layer Tennis also has its own RSS feed and Twitter account. I'll be checking things out tomorrow; will you?