Thank you one and all for your amazing effort and stunning work. Unfortunately we could only pick one design to win but everyone's participation made this a really amazing experience.

In the end we picked submission #173. Out of all the designs we picked this one for a couple reasons
1. The simple and large type face make it easy to read on a road sign, even if your driving at 40mph
2. The iconic illustration captured our imagination. It reminded us of the horizon and thinking about our future. Steve's main focus is on getting America's economic ship righted for our future generations, creating jobs and leveraging every innovation we can to make our government efficient and transparent.
3. The Stars/stripes/red/blue clearly communicated this is a campaign for public office.

It's great experiences with collaborative communities like this that Steve Welch wants to bring to government, making it a more efficient and transparent process. Thanks again and all the best in your future endeavors!

Oh yeah, one other thing that came out of the meeting: We're staying away from the Silhouette of PA. We figure it confuse constituents since we're not representing the whole state, just the district.

We just had a staff meeting about all these amazing designs and here are some of the conclusions that we came too:

We definitely like capital 'W' followed by lower case 'elch'
We don't know how to display it but we're looking for a way to graphically communicate innovation, financial ingenuity and most importantly JOBS. We'll leave that up to the smart designers to acutalize ;-)
Our constituents tend to be a little older so we need to be able to relate to their aesthetic preference (whatever that means. gosh we're not really helping are we?).

steve will be running in 2010

We would also like to capitalize the 'W' in Welch, but leave 'elch' lowercase. It's easier to read that way.

Thank you everyone for their designs and for being patient with us as we learn the 99 Designs process (if you haven't noticed we're new to this). We realized after looking at the designs that we really like design that feature clean and bold text, specifically focusing on the word 'Welch'. Helvetica, Helvetica Neu or a similar Sans Seriff font seems to be working the best.

Thanks again for your designs, they really are impressive!

Some great submissions.....are focus for the campaign will be responsibility and accountability, while also highlighting Steve's entrepreneurial spirit...thx!