Before I announce the winner, let me say that it was a very difficult process choosing the winner. Vonda had an especially difficult time choosing one winner considering how many good entries there were and considering how much time and effort went into the designs.

For those that did not win, please do not analyze too carefully why you did not win or go back and compare our feedback to determine if it made sense in light of who the eventual winner was. We started the competition looking for specific things in a design, and while I think the winning design included some of those things, our design criteria may have changed slightly after we had a chance to compare many great designs. In the end we decided that a clean, simple design, was more important than one that had a lot of complicated design elements.

So the winner isRoldanh (with some modifications). Some of you will look at this design and think to yourselves that you spent much more time on your design that Roldanh did, which may be true. Im sure though that it is also the case that Roldanh has entered other contests and not won, so even if he/she did not spend a large amount of time on this contest, they may have spent time on other contests they did not win and things will average out. Hopefully, those of you that did not win this contest will win other contests in the future. Also, I am requesting from Roldanh that they make some changes to the design which if they agree will require them to spend more time finalizing the design.

There were two other designs by Stavanger and Bearbrick which had some design elements that we might like to use and so I will be contacting them to request that we use some of those elements in exchange for a small compensation. You could say that they were the second and third place winners, but I hesitate to call them that because there were about 6 or 7 designs in total that we seriously considered. Those included MrPsycho98, TheMilitant, IfThenElse, and Nabz...and even some of the entries which were eliminated had some great design elements but did not fit well with what we were looking for.

Thanks again for entering the contest, and I will keep your design skills in mind for the future if Im looking for some freelance work for a project that I think would fit your design skills and style well.

-- Snazawa

We are still in the process of making a decision. We'll have a final decision by the end of Wednesday, U.S. time. Thanks for your patience.

"Another direction" is a polite way of saying that she liked other designs better than yours. If you'd like when the contest is completed, I can try to give you some more specific feedback as to why she did not choose your design...however, as you know design is very subjective, not objective and often times beauty is in the eye of the beholder. :-)

"Another direction" is a polite way of saying that she like other designs better than yours. If you'd like when the contest is completed, I can try to give you some more specific feedback as to why she did not choose your design...however, as you know design is very subjective, not objective and often times beauty is in the eye of the beholder. :-)

I know what you guys are saying about copying...but I'm smart enough to tell if someone is copying or not, and I hope that I wouldn't award the winning prize to someone that copied from someone who submitted first. Every designer leaves a fingerprint of their style in each design and I wonder sometimes if when two designs are different but have some very similar elements if that designer didn't try to submit designs under two different screen names in order to try to improve their chances of winning. Anyhow, we are going to try to be as fair as possible and not award to someone who is copying...but if there are elements what we like of two different designs, we'll try to give a prize to both.

I don't think any of you can make a great living from just these contests, but it's a great way to improve your skills, build your portfolio, learn from other designers, and perhaps get your name recognized for regular work. I'm always looking for talented web designers, and I'll keep track of those that I think are really talented in case I need a design in the future that I think a particular designer would do well at.

Thank you everyone for your excellent entries! We are a little overwhelmed quite frankly with the number of entries and also the great quality. What makes our decision even more difficult is the fact that some of the entries are very similar. My guess is that some of you have submitted multiple entries under different user names...but this is just a guess. Anyhow, unless someone has something radically different to submit, we will go ahead and evaluate the submitted entries and try to make a decision by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest. Once the winner is chosen, we may request a few small changes to the winning design, but the designs submitted so far give us a good enough idea of what we can expect from the final design once submitted to us.

Thanks again for all of your hard work and for the excellent quality of the designs. We wish we could give out prizes to all of the top designs, but we'll probably only be able to award prizes to the top two or three entries.

-- Snazawa