Congrats to Indigooutline with design #37 - a close finish with malinic78 with #35 and ghm980 with #27.

I loved the inclusion of the Guru in GHM980's work, and the vibrant colours in Malinic's design.
In the end, it was the balance of the design, bright colours and a great layout that tipped the scales in Indigooutline favour!

I'll contact Indigooutline to arrange a final revision and payment. But a big thanks to all designers who entered the contest - your creativity kept me on my toes in thinking about how I wanted the designs to evolve.
I'll be running more contests in the future, and would be thrilled if many of you chose to enter them as well.

Thanks again everyone.
-Adam

Great revisions everyone - you're really taking on board my suggestions, whilst still making each design your own. Once again I'm impressed with the quality of work from the Sitepoint/99d crowd :-)

Most of the 4-star and 5-star designs are good enough to judge on right now, but in order to give everyone time to make a final revision, I'll wait until the last possible minute before awarding the contest.

I'mm be enlisting the help of my colleages and my other-half to make the final selection. We'll give final feedback to all entrants along with the selection of the winner.
I'll ask the winner to make a final round of tweaks and then email me the design as BOTH a layered PSD, and a PNG for each layer sepately (I'm ok with a layer containg all the backgrounds, a layer containing all the text etc).
Payment by paypal within minutes of me finding the files in my email inbox :-)
If you have a promotional site, I'm happy to include a link to it on the About page of BGG - It'll even be a 'do follow' :-)

The runner up will be asked to nominate a website they like with a 'tip jar' or 'Donate' button and we'll put $20 in as a sign of good faith.

Good luck to everyone!

Hello all, some interesting designs arriving, so here's some additional feedback and ideas for improvements.

Lots of these designs would be great for internal pages of an ecommerce site - but we want to project the idea that the Guru is an authoritative source of recommendations. I think we're underplaying that at the moment.

I really like the effect of the hero shot in #10 - It really conveys the benefit of getting your gift selections right.

Try and incoporate some of these ideas and you'll be head of the pack!

Some Hero shots for inspiration:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=5064438
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=2736060
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=3836393
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=4288667
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=4632243
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=4778766
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=5288523
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=5097919
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_clo…id=5607288

#3 reviewed and comments made.

Something that struck me as I was giving feedback to #3, was that we could make a play on 'The Guru Recommends' or 'Guru greats' with a rating for each gift. 'Guru awards 4 stars' or something of that nature - maybe an 'Ask the Guru' area?? I'm open to suggestions - Let your imaginations run wild!

2 good designs to start with - private comments to both designers done.

General Thoughts:
Both logos are focusing on the 'Gift' aspect - perhaps something emphasising the Guru component, or highlighting the 'Recommendation' aspect more.

The colour schemes need to be lighter and more 'delicate' see here for inspiration http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-…erm=orange

There's lots of ways to slice & dice the gift recommendations (e.g. by type of person or by type of gift) - some clever Information Architecture to address this would be an advantage.