Design Competition Winner – final face-off!

Well, folks – after much careful consideration (and some final tweaks) I’ve selected two finalists from the numerous excellent entries I received.  The two designers chosen for the final face-off are Roger from the UK and Neeraj from India. 

Roger impressed me right from his first design with its simple, straight-forward modern design style – and his final design kept true to form, whilst also covering the full spectrum of air, land and sea special ops elements.  From the start, Neeraj intrigued me with his very striking, unusual, and highly artistic designs – he also ended up submitting far many more designs than anyone else (some of which were highly artistic but not really suitable contenders).

So, without further delay – here are the two final designs are:

 Roger

 Neeraj

* UPDATE * 24.04.09:  The entry from Neeraj was disqualified.  WHY???  Well, there was always something about the design that struck me as familiar – and after a bit of searching, I’ve found out why – it is far too similar to the Officers’ cap badge of the Egyptian / United Arab Republic from the late ’50s – the early ’70’s (see below).

So, whether by accident or by intention, I’m afraid his design was not original enough to be able to remain in consideration.  In fairness to Neeraj, its also my mistake for not having noticed this similarity before – even though there was something about it that was nagging at the back of my mind.  As you can see now when you compare the two, there are some striking similarities – from the overall shape and “attitude” of the eagle, to the shield on the breast, to the shape of the legs and claws, and even the bar across the bottom. 

So, becuase of these factors I had to close the voting and declare Roger as the winner.

A couple of the other participants deserve special mention:

Quin Lawson from South Africa also submitted several nice and interesting designs – I especially liked his winged sword design – and he did the best job of anyone in terms of putting his designs in woodland, full-colour, ACU and MultiCam colourways – he even did them on PenCott, just for fun after the competition deadline was passed!

Alex Merill from California was the first person to send in a design, and as you can see, he had all the key elements pegged right from the start – and I especially liked the final, simplified, patch-style design he submitted.  More of Alex’s work can be seen on his website:  www.the9000.com