Remember last week’s voting event for the new Daytona State College logo? The winner has been announced as the logo with the college seal, but without shadowing. Out of 2718 votes, 1500 students and faculty chose this option:

If you’ve forgotten, these were all the options. The winner is third down:

I wanted the bottom one, with the shadowing, to win. It didn’t look good on the voting page (all blocky because of the way they scaled it). That’s why it lost. The one you all picked would’ve been my second choice, though.

I saw this on the Daytona State College home page when I went there today; an event called Pick Our Logo:

“DAYTONA BEACH, FL (Aug. 25, 2008) – Pick Our Logo is a unique opportunity for Daytona State College students, faculty, staff and the community to have a voice in our new logo.”

The college is allowing students to vote their favorite from one of four prototypes for the new DSC logo.

Click the image above to see a bigger version, or go here on the college’s website to see them all.

The immediate problem on the college’s website is that the images are about 1000 pixels wide, but they’re set to be 500 pixels wide in the HTML source code. Many browsers, including Internet Explorer 7 which I’m using now at the college computer lab, use “nearest neighbor” interpolation to scale images down. It looks nothing short of awful.

That’s exactly what logo 4 looks like on my screen. See all the jagged edges? It shouldn’t look like that. How are students supposed to make an informed vote when they’re seeing bastardized versions of the logos?

I know logo #4 is the best and most appealing choice, so I voted for it. It won’t win though because it looks the worse when scaled with the nearest neighbor algorithm. Hopefully some of the students use the newer Mozilla Firefox 3, which has upgraded to bicubic resampling.

Another problem is that the logos say “Option 1,” “Option 1,” “Option 4,” and “Option 4,” when it should be 1, 2, 3, 4. Everyone makes mistakes, but this is plain sloppy.

Either way, I’m glad that the college is going to its students for this decision. Vote here now; the opportunity ends in 27 hours (2008 August 28 at 5 P.M. Eastern).

Unfortunately, your vote may count for nothing, because the site says this:

“Vote as many times as you’d like for your favorite logo”

There’s nothing to stop you. You could just vote for the same one, over and over again, to skew the system. I could easily rig up a script with IMacros to vote for the 4th logo, thousands of times, if I was so inclined. Hopefully no one will do this.

I was at the welcome party in the courtyard at the Daytona Beach campus, which ended an hour ago. I’ll post my photos when I get back to my office this evening.

What did you think of the party? Comment now, and I’ll include it in an article later today.