It was not all that long ago, just back in January in fact, that the Fresno Arts Council unveiled the ArtHop logo for 2017; the one that looked like it should be on a sign outside the International House of Pancakes.

It wasn’t the most well-received of logos.

The council, which organizes the monthly open-studio event in downtown Fresno, is redesigning said logo for 2018 and its looking to you for help. That is, provided you have some design skills and can create a logo that is “legible, reproducible, and scalable for large and small formatting.”

Those logo design contest started this month and runs until Sept. 30, at which time a winner will be chosen (or not, if no suitable entries are received) by the Fresno Arts Council board of directors. There is a $500 cash prize for the winning designer, whose work will be on all the Arthop promo materials and the Fresno Art’s Council’s website and Fresno Arthop’s Facebook and related social media pages. Complete rules and details are available at the Fresno Arts Council web page.

Some professional designers and artists balk at such competition no doubt, but design contests can be fairly common. Granville’s urban development division did a contest to put a mural on its Lede development and Kuppa Joy recently held a similar contest for its Tower District location, which produced some rather awesome looking work from artist Benjamin Short.

The next question is whether the council will be shooting a new ArtHop video for 2018, because this one from Top Hand Media still holds up.