Dear Steemit community,

We are all in Love with Steemit most of us spending day and night on this wonderful platform. To spread the word even faster we would like to announce a mascot contest for Steemit. 

A mascot is always thought to bring luck and represent a group with common public identity, it can take the role of the ‘Spokesperson"  Source Wikipedia

So why a Mascot?

Heading towards mass-adoption a mascot could help in many ways. 

The Steemit mascot could help newcomers on the platform, we could produce tutorial videos with the mascot teaching how to use HTML etc. 

We could use the name of the mascot as a #Tag for newcomers to use so different initiatives like Project Curie could find new authors and post (so no need to use 4 hashtags for different causes)

The Mascot could be sold as a doll or a family of characters could be developed to drive revenue to Steemit.com (Proof of Concept: Line Characters) There could be a licencing business ahead of us if we do it right. 

If you search for mascot you will find over 214 hits with mascots users have created in the past, we think that a mascot is really needed 

Submission, Judging, and Contest Prize

• Submit your designs in the comment / reply section by 12.00 PM UTC Time (24 September 2016).
• You may submit as many designs as you like (near-duplicate entries will not be accepted)
• Top 10 designs by amount of votes (not comment payout value) will be selected
• Ties in number of votes are counted as one position in the top 10 designs 
• 1st place: 50% of SBDs generated by this post
• 2nd and 3rd place: 25% of SBDs each generated by this post
• Judges retain the right to screen entries for a minimum quality
• 2 Wildcard for late submissions to skip the voting requirement will be granted (judges decision)
•  Winning designs will be announced in a followup post

Guidelines:

• Entries should be colored
• Entries with sex, violence or suggestive scenes will not be accepted
• Please do not include a background scene or text in your submission. The background should be transparent. Props and accessories are optional and acceptable

The 10 Judges of this contest are

• @kevinwong (Our party judge)
• @roelandp (Our festival judge)
• @sirwinchester (Our dancing judge)
• @knozaki2015 (Our travel judge)
• @lordvader (Our intergalactic judge)
• + 5 other Category Judges (Art, Fashion, etc.)

Disclaimer

• Make sure designs are original
• Judges reserve the right to forfeit submissions that are misleading
• Once the mascot winner designs are announced, we will host a name contest for the mascot
• At the moment this is an unofficial user initiative, I have contacted @ned and we are looking forward to his response

Have fun and we can't wait for your awesome submissions!

Big thanks to @alwayzgame, he came up with the initial idea in our chat!!! @kevinwong for helping me create this post and avoid mistakes in the process