We have a winner…and, apparently, a loser

Okay, the polls on the Mixology Monday logo contest have closed (I had to disable the poll to make it stop counting, but that also means the results won’t display to everyone — you’re gonna have to trust me on this one), and here’s where things stand: 300 people cast votes on their choice of logo, and the winner, with 107 votes, is this design created by Courtney Patubo. Congratulations to Courtney; she’ll receive a signed copy of Wayne Curtis’ And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails; thanks, Courtney! (And shoot me your address in an e-mail so I can get the book headed your way.)

And thanks as well to all the designers who submitted logo ideas, and to everyone who took the time to vote.

In the process of putting together this friendly competition, it became apparent that some folks were still fond of the original MxMo logo. To these readers, I offer an apology for not taking that logo into account in the voting, but also an explanation:

As I mentioned when I first proposed the logo competition, Mixology Monday has lasted much longer than I think any of the original participants thought it would, and has attracted many more participants than we initially imagined. Over the course of two years of moderating Mixology Monday, it became clear to me that a couple of the event’s aspects were becoming confusing for participants, and difficult and time-consuming to manage. One of these aspects was the archiving of past events — right now it’s stuck deep in the archives of this site, and it even takes me too damn many mouse clicks to get to the page that has all the relevant info. This is being remedied in the next month or so, when I get the time to give Mixology Monday its own site. Setting up a new site is time consuming and doesn’t come free, but I think it’ll make it much easier to follow upcoming events, and to find out about past ones.

The other aspect that had become difficult was the logo. Darcy was very kind to create the original design which so many people came to know and love, and pretty much every month for the past two years, he’s updated it and forwarded the new versions along to me to distribute to each month’s hosts. The downside was that the logo had to be changed every month — Darcy has professed he’s not a designer, and I’m pretty damn lucky if I remember how to log into WordPress every day, so setting up an automatic system like the Dood has been discussing wasn’t part of the equation. Compound that with the fact that both Darcy and I have outside lives, replete with spouses and kids, and a little matter of updating a logo every month and passing it back-and-forth via e-mail to the hosts can turn into a time-consuming annoyance — not a huge amount of time, true, but a pain in the ass nonetheless. And for something that’s supposed to be fun and casual like Mixology Monday, having drudgework involved kind of runs counter to the whole idea.

So how much easier, I thought, if we kicked off a new year of Mixology Monday with a new logo, one that can be used every month without any kind of administrative or technological hassle, and that’s been created by an event reader or participant, and that is voted on by everyone who’s followed Mixology Monday for months or years. And we’ll even have a modest prize, just to make it more exciting. What’s not to like?

What I hadn’t counted on was that outpouring of support for the old logo that’s cropped up in the comments of the election post. So, the loser in the header of this post is me: my apologies for not considering support for the old logo. It wasn’t my intent to strongarm the community into using another graphic, but rather my desire to make participation and hosting easier for everyone, and to make moderating the event a less cumbersome experience for myself.

I think Dood and others have a great idea to make updating the logo with event particulars an automated process, but at the same time, as others have mentioned, it’s good to have a logo that doesn’t require such updating, that can stand alone for the event. That’s my two cents, anyway.

Now, on to rum….