A beautiful iPhone app icon thanks to 99Designs

I'm a developer. After the years I spent developing for iPhone I'm confident in saying I can recreate any layout. That is actually one of the services I offer to my clients: pixel perfect iPhone apps. Although I'm not a designer I also always managed to pull off creating the graphics for my apps. It is obvious that it's amateur design work but it has always seemed to work. Not only, I never invested one dollar for my apps: nothing for the layouts, nothing for promotion. Actually that's not true, I once paid for someone to write a press release which you can find here but that's it. I finally gave in and invested in a graphic element. Obviously I decided to start front the most important piece of artwork: the icon. The app that will receive this "gift" is MyLyrics, one of my most successful apps which I already talked about here. I wanted to avoid websites like oDesk and Elance. I never had a good vibe by them therefore preferred to stay away. The past few weeks instead, I noticed 99Designs come up quite often in various recommendations and I decided to go for it. I signed up and added what I was looking for. I tried to give a direction while still leaving the designers "free" to experiment; trying to follow the advice given here. The base price for an icon is 149USD which seems quite reasonable. In addition, thanks to my friend George Favvas' startup Rewardli I was able to get the Turbo pack for free (much more visibility, 99USD worth). The contest lasted a few weeks with various stages. Every designer submits their design(s) and you rate and give feedback. I noticed that the more you show that you're involved (via feedback), more designers come around and submit something. For example, 46 designers came up with a total of 176 icon ideas for my app based on my directives and feedback. I'm currently in the final stage: need to pick a winner. Please help me out and let me know what you think about the various designs. You can see the latest poll here. I would really appreciate your thoughts. Please keep in mind MyLyrics and what it does: find a song based on a few words of the lyrics. I had an amazing experience with 99designs.com and will definitely recommend it. In fact I already had to my current client who commissioned me an app and needed guidance.
Check out how to start a new project at 99designs. Turns out, even Stack Overflow used this website for their own logo. To see which options they had, check out their contest here.

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