BIOPLASTICS LOGO CONTEST TURNED INTO A JOKE

Only one design remaining deserves to win, that by Ian Bonilla. All the others are not very good or most appropriate for the designated use and can emboss well. Cereplast, who sponsored the contest, came up with a joke of a system to select their 200 finalists (originally 50). They set up a page where you could vote one design against another and urged entrants to get everyone they know to vote for their design. It could take hundreds of clicks before you ever saw a logo you wanted to vote for, and if you signed up and logged in your vote could count double! Of course the public wasn't really voting, it was the entrants themselves driven by self-interest to win the $25,000 at the end of the rainbow, and most were voting down their opposition, you could witness position changes of 500 to 1000 places (out of 1300) in just 20 minutes. On the blog for the contest several entrants suggested that all entries be looked at since some very good designs would likely fall below the 200 threshold (and they did). So a cutesy no dinosaurs, a tornado plastic cup, some hand-drawn spikey finger things, full-blown ads with text, pointy wine-stopper things, and the bp logo (evoke an oil-spill?) are in the running while many brilliant designs are not. Most frustrating was that the contest spelled out rules: one color, 3 designs per submission (general, recycle, compost), and the correct category number (7). Many of the finalists did not follow these rules and were not removed prior to the voting.