I’m hoping this’ll be as successful as last year’s Style Contest, and that Automattic will be as generous with their support as Six Apart were with theirs. (Matt has already thrown in $500 prize money, which is a good start, but a little linkage wouldn’t hurt.) I’m not worried about the two-month deadline from a design point of view, but it may be a little short notice to get top-quality judges and sponsors in place. Judging and adminstrating these things is a lot of work.

Potentially, this could be a real boost to takeup of the custom CSS option on wordpress.com, which so far has been mostly limited to people already proficient in CSS and those who know enough to make minor tweaks to a theme they’re otherwise happy with. There’s no intrinsic reason why this should be so. After all, not everyone who installs a wordpress theme is familiar with XHTML and PHP.

The GPL requirement does limit what we can use to create our styles (no stock photography, icons, brushes etc.) and I don’t see the necessity for it since, as adam points out, not even the most rabid free beer fundamentalists can seriously argue that CSS for WP needs to be GPL. If I’m not allowed to touch PHP I can’t insert the required links anyway, though, so this is pretty much moot. Anyway, it’s more of a challenge having to make everything from scratch. Time to dig out the camera again.