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At the risk of becoming a blog purely about competitions, I thought I’d just mention a intriguing contest being run by Moo cards just now. In case you don’t know, Moo are a company who cleverly segue with your Flickr account to allow for a very easy way to print business cards and postcards. Like Flickr, Moo is designed for photos, but can be used just as easily for artwork, and this competition seems to recognise that.

For the competition, you have to design a Christmas card. It can be any type of image, including photographs and drawings, and anything in between that can be represented digitally - say, a collage, or textiles that could be scanned in to your computer.

You enter by uploading your image to Flickr and adding it to the Moo competition pool, whereupon anyone who wants to will be able to buy your image as a card.

Competition aside, it seems to me that everyone’s a winner here. Flickr get a ton more users signing up because they want to be in for a shot at the prize (which by the way is a nice $1,000 in each of four categories); Moo get the printing work; their chosen charity, Médecins Sans Frontières, get a cut of each sale, and you? Well, you get a number of benefits:

- You get your work seen by a large audience

- You get, if you wish to purchase them, high-quality cards of your own work

- You get an easy place to direct friends, family, or clients to, where they can also buy your work.

In short, it’s a typical web 2.0 event, and the judges, from places such as Threadless and Etsy, reflect that too. Judges? Why yes, but only for some of the categories. Because peer-judgement is also a hallmark of the web 2.0 age, isn’t it? So, one of the winners will be the card that sells the most.

It seems to me there’s lots to consider here, right down to the time when you upload your image/s: too early, and they’ll be several clicks away from each user (given the chronological way that Flickr organises its images); too late, and people won’t have as much time to buy. I could go on - but I won’t; instead I will invite you to muse in the comments section below.

Meanwhile, here is the FAQ page for the competition itself.

And, argh, Christmas! I know people hate early mentions of the holiday season, but in a way I’m grateful to Moo for bringing this up. If you want to design and draw your own cards this year, the earlier you think about it, the better they are going to be. Draw Anyway readers are busy people, and we need the time to get ourselves organised. So even if you’re not interested in the competition, it might be time to start thinking about your cards.

Finally, if you don’t think you have a chance in the world of winning the Flickr contest (and I’d agree; I think it is going to be very heavily subscribed; I don’t envy the judges wading through what will surely be thousands of images), don’t forget our *much smaller* competiton to win a book is still open until Monday.