And the winner is...

This has been one of the hardest posts I've had to write, because I know whichever entry I pick as winner of the icon competition, a lot of people are going to be disappointed that I didn't pick their favourite.

Trying to select a winner has forced me to think about what I wanted to get out of this competition. On the surface, the main goal of the competition was just to replace the ugly default icon on the PSP's XMB. However as I've checked out all the entries over the past couple of weeks, I've come to realise that the main objective of the competition should be to define an identity for Daedalus.

In the end, one of the main criteria I've used to select the winner is how well the design works as a logo, or identity, for the project as a whole. For this reason I've picked Patrick Ahmann's design:




I think Patrick's design is wonderfully clean and stylish, and the colours look especially crisp and vibrant on the PSP's screen*. The typography, particularly for the 'daedalus' logo is very simple and distinctive and I think it would work well as a logo on the web. What's more, I got quite excited about using the cog motif on the logo as a progress indicator on loading screens :)

So, well done Patrick!

I want to say a big 'thank you' to everyone who contributed. Many people put a lot of work into this and I'm really sorry that I could only pick one winner. I think the quality of the final 10 was excellent, so if you disagree with my choice hopefully there's something there for you :)

-StrmnNrmn

*annoyingly Blogger insists on downsampling the images above slightly, so they look a little fuzzy. Click through for the original versions...

Icon Competition - Shortlist

I've just finished compiling a shortlist of what I think are the 10 best submissions for the icon competition.

I received just under 200 entries in total; I've been blown away by the response. Picking just 10 entries has been very difficult. In the end I had a 'longlist' of around 30 entries which I thought were superb, and it's taken me over an hour to whittle that down to just 10 entries.

Here is my shortlist, presented in the order they were submitted. Feel free to discuss these in the comments - I'll be reading your comments over the weekend, and I'll pick a final winner on Monday.

Thanks to everyone who entered - you're awesome!



-StrmnNrmn

Cladil

Pleaser

Pharonyk

Steven La

Victor Aguirre

Joël Dos Santos

Jay Mc

Patrick Ahmann

Hykypoo

juniorslick363

Edit 20/11/2007 12:00 Fix Pharonyk's name.

Last call for icons+backgrounds

Just a reminder that today is the last day for sending in your entries to the icon competition. I'll be making the shortlist sometime tomorrow morning, so provided you get your entry to 12pm (that's noon - GMT!) on Saturday it will probably be included.

Once I've made a shortlist of what I feel are the 10 best submissions, I'll post them up here so that people can give their thoughts, before I pick a final winner on Monday.

-StrmnNrmn

Icons update (part 2)!

..And the last update today (I promise!)

I just wanted to say that I've now received about 100 entries for the icon competition. I'm about halfway through the list so far; apologies if I've not responded to your entry yet.

I've had a lot more entries than I was expecting. Originally I was planning on posting all the entries so that people could comment on their favourites before I picked a winner. There are too many entries for me to be able to do that, so next weekend I'll pick my favourite 10 and show them instead.

I've had lots of entries from readers of PSP-Generation, so a big 'merci beaucoup' for that. It's certainly helping exercise my rusty French :)

There's just under a week left before the competition ends, so be sure to get your submission in shortly. Thanks for all the entries so far!

-StrmnNrmn

PS Remember it's 'daedalus' and not 'deadalus'. It's an easy mistake to make :)