We picked our winner, and are happy to announce that uzorita won with design #28! This design ended up being the best fit for our needs and our building. Thank you all for participating! It was wonderful to have so many options, and we wish you luck on whatever contests you enter in the future. And once again, contratulations to uzorita! I will be contacting you shortly.

Again, thank you all for your submissions! We really appreciate all of your hard work. The review committee met today, and we have narrowed our selection down to three designs: #10, #28, and #45. Congratulations! We have to look into some other factors first, before we can decide a winner, so we will work to make that final decision as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding as we finish going through this process.

Thank you to everyone who submitted a design. Our review commitee will meet to make a decision about the winner on Wednesday, July 30. We apologize for the delay, but that was the first opportunity we could get everyone together. Thanks again to everyone who participated in this contest!

We thought some additional clarification might be helpful to all.

Even though the Center is 30 years old, many people don't know what goes on here - some folks think we're a school for puppeteers. What we are is a family friendly venue that offers fully-staged puppet performances (think Broadway of puppetry), education programs and a museum. Though the majority or our audience falls in the 5 - 10 year-old age range, we do have programming for teens and adults - and many of our shows are delightful to adults as well as children (think "Shrek"). To put it simply, people who come to the Center can see a show, make their own puppet and see rare and wonderful objects in our global museum of puppetry. This is the idea we'd like to try to convey, if at all possible, in our proposed signage.

Finally, it's OK to use imagery of puppets that were created by the Center that you see on our web site (shows directed by Jon Ludwig or Bobby Box). We own those images and would have no rights issues with their use.

Thanks to all who have submitted designs!

We like #5, too. It's colorful and kid-friendly. #4 is good, too, but the words run a little long, and we might not need that many images of puppets.

Please keep these ideas coming! Any and all are appreciated!

CONTEST UPDATE (the contest brief will soon be updated to reflect this)

As more people here at the Center have looked at the entries, we are now open to simpler, more direct designs, like #3. Since we want this to be eye-catching, the name in large print with the website address would certainly accomplish this goal. The other information might still be nice to have, but since it sometimes looks a bit too wordy, we're now open to looking at other options.

So, if you have an idea that is simpler and only conveys the most basic information, please submit it. The name of the Center (NOT necessarily in logo form, but it could be) and the website are great things to include.

Or, if you've already worked on a design with more information, please still submit those, too, as we might decide that we do need more of this information displayed.

Sorry for the change! But your entries have helped us to see that we're willing consider more options than we thought. And I hope you're able to use this extra guidance to your benefit.

To answer malza,
I do not believe we are willing to pay by Western Union. However, if you would be willing to pay the fee, I think we might be able to do that. If this prevents you from being able to enter the contest, please let me know so I can discuss the options with someone else.

And to jessi0031 - I'm glad that explanation worked for you! Good luck!

Thanks to LKirk and Hotphics for designs #1 - #3! I appreciate that you both took the time to enter this, but these are not the kind of designs that we're looking for right now. To explain more - We are not looking for a new logo, but for a design to be painted onto the outside of one of our walls that will convey information about the Center to encourage people to visit us, and also just to make people aware of our location. (The back of our building is on a busy corner street, so although a lot of people drive by, there's no sign telling them what the building is.) Please read our contest brief, as it will give you more information about what we are looking for. The link in the brief may not work for you, but if you type the address into your browser, that should work. You only need to look at the 17th Street pictures (you can ignore the Spring Street pictures.) Thanks!

To answer jessi0031:
1 - If an image isn't copyrighted by some other entity, I think it would be all right to use. For example, no Muppet or Sesame images allowed, but if you're referring to an image of children or of a puppet in our possession, that MIGHT be okay, but I'm not sure. If there's a specific image that you have a question about, I can ask about it on Monday.
2 - I have not heard anything about color preferences. We do want this to be eye-catching, so color would certainly be a good thing.
3 - The design will be painted onto the outside of a building wall. A billboard is mentioned, because we might want to incorporate a billboard into the upper-right corner of the wall. (You can see this in the pictures we linked - the link is not working for me right now either, but if you type the address into your browser, the images should come up. I will try to fix the link problem when I'm done with this.) This is NOT a necessary design element, but if somebody likes this idea, they are free to include it in their design. So, only one wall design is needed, either with or without a billboard.
4 - Can you pull the images from the PDF we gave you the link to? If not and you still need them some other way, please let me know.
5 - By "17th Street pictures only" I just meant that the PDF of images includes pictures of the Spring Street side of our building, but we are not looking for designs for those signs right now. We want the 17th Street wall to be painted, which is why we put the pictures up.
I'm sorry for any confusion! If something is still not clear, please let me know.

To answer intrepidquppy:
Thank you for alerting me to the broken link. As I mentioned above, I'm going to try to fix it right now, but you can also just type the address into your browser, and that should work. But if not, let me know.