Chiquita launched and completed a contest to find 18 user submitted designs for their widely known banana sticker. They have only ever changed the design a handful of times before in their history but this is the first time they allowed users to submit and vote on designs. Exciting i know!

The winners aren't so exciting though, which proves that voting doesn't necessarily produce the best out of the bunch. You can see the "winners" here. What a design contest needs is a panel of curators and design professionals who have trained eyes to decide what works the best in context. There can also be a user vote portion. The thing that matters here is how the public will perceive it. Since most people will ONLY see the sticker images and not the fact that it was user-voted then the final designs are that much more important.

Here are the designs that I thought were the best. Think of them in the larger context of how they would look on the banana as a whole and not a random floating piece of art. Note: All of them received under 20 votes, most 0 or 1.

This one is a little fuzzy but I love the idea of a Lady Gaga banana. It wouldn't be too far from the truth. I could see her wearing a banana costume made out of real banana peel. She did wear raw meat.

And last but certainly not least, no online contest is complete without an appearance from PedoBear! Note: It had 3,745 votes, but I'm sure it was discounted due to the indecency clause in their rules.

I'll be putting these on my curated design blog CauseHabits. There you can find all interesting design and art items that I find inspiring. You can subscribe to it via RSS there or add causehabits manually to who you're following on Tumblr (I took off the Tumblr top reblog / follow bar because it was aesthetically displeasing)

-db