Not a designer? Get involved with the MetaCPAN logo contest anyway!
The MetaCPAN logo contest is now in full swing, thanks in no small part to FLORA for his blood, sweat and tears in organizing it and also to the Enlightened Perl Organization, which fully funded this contest with astonishing speed.
Just to recap, the contest rules are posted at contest.metacpan.org and the entries are being posted at entries.contest.metacpan.org.
Now, you don't need to be a designer to get involved. Here are a couple of ways you can help out:
1) Get the word out. Let your designer friends know there is $400 up for grabs (not to mention eternal glory). If you're active on Twitter, please tweet about it as well. Send an email to your local PerlMongers group etc.
2) Comment on the entries. Because there is no limit on the number of entries per contestant, the logo submission process is allowed to be iterative. Constructive criticism can lead to authors resubmitting tweaked versions of their logos, which can only be good for the contest.
As aside, anyone who has contributed to MetaCPAN will be able to vote on submissions. If you'd like to vote, it's not too late to get a pull request in to MetaCPAN. Fix an issue, send a documentation patch, etc. There are lots of place to help. If you're unsure of where to begin, say hello on #metacpan and someone will be sure to point you in the right direction.
I hack on MetaCPAN, CPAN modules and other fun stuff.
Btw, sometimes I wonder if the whole "CPAN and then metaCPAN" is a concept overload for people outside the Perl world I'm already hearing in my head: So is CPAN obsolete? Is metacpan the new CPAN? CPAN 2.0?
So maybe the logo can somehow anticipate this by adding some explanatory tag line like "CPAN and beyond" (but is it clear enough?) or "Next generation interface to CPAN".
I hadn't thought about it that way, but it's an interesting point. MetaCPAN was intended to be the name of the API and not intended to be a front end search. The idea was to build an easy way to extract metadata about the CPAN (hence the name). If someone wanted to use that metadata to build a search site, that was fine.
As it happens, the search site was eventually built within the scope of this project in addition to the API. With the search site becoming more popular, MetaCPAN is now probably more strongly associated with the search site than with the actual API that it's built on and named after. So, I could see how there would be some confusion there. If it were called search.metacpan.org, that would probably make it a bit clearer, but I'm not sure that's the right solution.