socialmedian design contest: we have a winner!

Thank you so much to all of our designers for participation in the first socialmedian design contest.  You all did some awesome work and we are so thankful and appreciate of your efforts.

The way the judging works is as follows:

1. We enabled anyone to vote for their favorite.  The winner of the fan vote was to receive $500.
2. We have a judges vote.  If the judges vote for the same as the fan vote, the one winner gets $1000.  If the judges selected a different contestant, that person would get $1000 and the fan vote winner would still get $500.
   

The judges scored the entries based on both design and user experience contributions.  Designs were given more points for implying valuable user experience enhancements vs. just adding design elements.  We also heavily weighted designs which contained user experience enhancements that we are likely to add derivatives of immediately on the site -- even if not exactly (i.e. smart direction that we are going to jump all over).

Our choice for the winner is

design contest entry #2: Deepak Singh

We chose Deepak as the winner for the reasons above.  In fact, we are right now working on many of the enhancements Deepak suggested -- several of which were not on our immediate radar prior to his submission to the contest.  In particular we liked the implied in-line ajax adding snip and news, smart navigational drop downs for  key actions/areas of the site, as well as filters.  While we will implement differently than Deepak's exact design, he has inspired us greatly.

As Deepak won BOTH the judges vote as well as the popular voting, Deepak is our sole winner and will receive $1000.

Thank you again everyone for participating!

We'll do another contest soon.

-the socialmedian team