And the SteemMakers logo & banner design contest winner is ...

First of all we wish to thank every participant for their efforts. We really appreciate the interest in our project and the time spent. We got 43 entries and the result is a variety of styles, ideas and quality. This is an unexpected luxury for us and we are grateful for it. It also means there is more too choose from which made it a bit harder to us. It somehow also saddens us we have to disappoint the designers of the 42 entries that did not win.

vhktor

It took us a while to agree on the winner and in the end we collectively settled on this entry by vhktor.

The design has almost everything we were looking for:

• It is a flat design
• It has a reference to SteemMakers in that it has the S and M integrated
• It has a block referencing the blockchain
• It can be combined with SteemMaker's content
• It does not focus an a subgroup of the audience
• It is theme-able which allows us to focus on a subgroup if we wish to

They are not big but compared to other designs the vhktor design has some shortcomings:

• The logo does not work well when scaled down a lot. The tips of the 's' disappear.
• vhktor did not made an accompanying banner
• The quality of the files is not top and needs to be worked on

Prizes

When we started the contest we indicated that we would be handing out a 50 USD prize and would adjust this depending on the entries. We chose to move forward with the design by vhktor but don't consider it fair to assign the whole 50 USD to vhktor because of the aforementioned shortcomings.

Instead we chose to split the 50 USD in 30 for vhktor and 2 times 10 for two runners-up that greatly helped us in discovering what we needed. Both designs by Podan are of very high quality but in the end we didn't choose this design because some thought it did reference to much to an electronics print and thus a subgroup. We really liked Orcheva's logo and banner designs but somehow they didn't work and we chose the vhktor one.

Note on plagiarism

We have been as careful as we could with our selection and it has been brought to our attention that some entries look like plain plagiarism. Others seem to be on the edge and should at least have mentioned where they got their inspiration. We have internally agreed to not accuse anyone because we think we are not in a position to do so. We think the subjects know what they are doing and should understand that what they are doing is unacceptable. From our side we will pay even more attention to this and certainly to the users in question.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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