A couple weeks ago, I reached out to the Freethoughtosphere to ask for a new banner for this blog. The design I had was pretty boring, and I know that people are talented. What I didn’t realize is how talented y’all were, and I want to take a moment to thank everyone who contributed a banner image to this contest. It was a lot of fun for me to see all the different ideas people had.

I also want to thank everyone who voted for an idea, taking the difficult decision out of my hands. Without any further ado, I will present the results of the vote below the fold.

Because I foolishly didn’t lay out a method for voting, some people voted for their favourite one, others voted for a handful of favourites, and others ranked all of them. This made things a little bit tricky. What I did first was treat all votes as ranked votes from 5 to 1. So, if you expressed a preference for design #2 but did not say what you thought of the others, then #2 got 5 points, and the rest got zero.

When calculated in that way, the order of preference was: #4, #2, #1, #3, and #5.

However, that system may give undue influence to those voters who expressed only one favourite, since the other designs all got zero, when potentially they could have had more. So I removed the weighting and went instead for the sheer number of votes each design received (every vote is counted as a 1).

When I used that method, the order of preference was: #4, #2, #1, with #3 and #5 tied for 4th place.

However, I reckoned that this method might give undue influence to people that voted for more than one, since their votes are getting counted in multiple columns. So, I instead only considered the top vote from each person and disregarded all other statements of preference.

Using this method, the order of preference was: #2, #4, #1, #3, and #5.

There was a very close fight between #2 and #4, but I’m going to have to give it to #4, because under both ranked and unranked conditions, it came out on top, and was edged out of the first selection race by only one vote. Stephanie Zvan has already threatened to stalk me, and I don’t know what’s going to happen when she finds out I didn’t pick her design, but there’s a lot of ground between where she is and where I am – I’m fairly confident in my safety.

Everyone whose design was entered in the race will receive a copy of the CROWN EP, signed by the members of the band. Please e-mail me your mailing address and I will arrange to have them set to you post-haste. Thanks to everyone for voting, and enjoy the new banner (which will go up very soon).

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