In light of the lovely Santa Hats community banner we’ve had for the merry months of Secret Santa 2012 and the fact that our original banner was looking a little shabby, we have a proposal for you: a banner challenge.

Here’s the plan: we set you a theme on the first of each month. People then make banners and comment with them to that month’s post – all comments will be screened; comments without banners in them will then be unscreened. There will be a limit for sending banners in, something like two to three weeks. Then we’ll post all of the banners anonymously and everyone in the community can vote for their favourite (including the makers, but you do only get one vote each). That new banner is then our banner for the following month.

At the moment we’re thinking of doing this monthly, and we have a list of possible themes for every month of the year, but depending on interest it might change to seasonally or another time frame. (I’ve seen the shiny things that people in this community can make though and I’m hoping that it’ll happen monthly :D )

The Rules:
1) Everyone is invited to play, seriously, everyone, the more the merrier!
2) Banners must be safe for work.
3) Banners must have a width of 800 and a height of 350 and Preferably a png or jpg file.
4) We will make your banners anonymous, so please don’t tell or show anyone what you’ve made. Once the winner has been chosen though you’re free to share your banner wherever you like. (So, for example, if you make a banner for February’s challenge you’ll be free to do whatever you like with it from March 1st.)
5) When new films come out (Iron Man 3, Thor 2) please don’t use images from those until we say it’s safe so no one gets spoiled!
6) You can submit no more than 3 banners (for now, we'll see how much interest we get).

February’s Challenge: This is the month of St Valentine’s Day and the name of our community is Love Is For Children, so for this month the theme is ‘love’. This could be romantic, realistic, harsh, assassin love, any kind of love, just a banner with Clint, Natasha, and love.

February Deadline: You have until Friday 25th January to comment to this post with your banners or links to your banners. (Apologies for the short time frame this month, but January has already begun and we need to post the banners that weekend/Monday to give people a bit of time to vote.)

As stated, all comments to this post will be screened. Comments that don’t contain banners will be unscreened. So feel free to post banners, ask questions, give us feedback, and all that jazz :)

EDIT: in answer to questions below, you can submit no more than 3 banners and everyone, including makers, gets one vote.