We have a winner! Thanks everyone for your efforts, there were some great designs presented!

All,

A few comments about the entries so far:

* The envelope colouring and design in #5 and #9 is excellent - the virus infected envelope is immediately obvious, as is the deep red. The smiley and skull & crossbones in #6 are also very good, immediately meaningful without needing words.

* The designs which represent the flow of traffic linearly seem to make the most sense logically -- #6 and #10 especially.

* The funnel metaphor in #10 is very meaningful, we like this a lot.

* A reminder to the brief; we're looking for something with predominantly white background, and a crisp, clean feel in the Apple style. Surprisingly, nobody's used any mirroring yet ;)

I'd say the design which makes best use of the above points is in the running.

All,
Apologies for the delay in feedback the last day or so, will post some brief notes for each submission now and follow up with more detail tomorrow.

Thanks pixeldoodle for your #1 entry. A few comments:

* The overall asthetic of your diagram is good.

* Your use of a red question mark for unknown email, red exclamation mark for unwanted email and a green exclamation mark for good email is on the right track -- these iconographics convey meaning well.

* Your choice of colour is good, and the general shading & highlighting you apply to the shield is on the right track. Perhaps try to incorporate more 'depth' to the diagram, rather than lay everything out in a two-dimensional plane.

* In your diagram, the trashcan containing spam and viruses is mail which has been deleted. Less obvious spam would be quarantined and made available for inspection, so perhaps eliminate the Management portal icon and place the magnifying glass over the Quarantine. Also, see if you can come up with a more effective graphic to describe a Quarantined area.

* I don't think you've captured the logical flow clearly enough. It's not clear to me at a glance how email flows through your diagram.

* We'd like more emphasis on multiple layers of defence - perimeter and core.

* The most important distinction we're trying to make is that the whole filtering exercise happens within the "internet cloud", rather than at a customer's site. We'd like to identify the customer site as the final endpoint for email as (for example) a mail server behind an Internet link. Keeping unwanted email away from this infrastructure is one of our key selling points, so we want to make that clear.

Hi moltoallegro,

We do already have a process diagram which we've used for years, but it's pretty awful and out of date and I'd rather not influence a new visual design by referring to the old one. If you think the concept can be explained more clearly to a design audience, I'd be interested in your suggestions ;)