Mark McGrath of Inertia Web Design came up with the winning design submission for the Thought Mechanics redesign contest. Sorry, you can’t see it yet, but we are planning on launching the new design on August 1, 2006.

The redesign contest wasn’t as big of a hit as the Squible Logo contest, which received a whopping 44 entries. Probably because designing an entire website is a little more involved than designing a logo. Be that as it may, we had a ton of inquiries, but only 4 submissions by two different people. I’d like to thank Headset Options for taking the time to submit THREE entries.

When we launch the redesign, we will also be introducing channels. Channels are going to be different sections of thought mechanics dedicated to individual topics run by different people. So far we have 7 channels–design, environment, money, movies, music, parenting, and technology. The main site will keep its focus on politics while mixing in posts from the different channels.

We are open to adding more channels, so if you can think of a channel that you would like to be the author of, let us know! Channels authors who get advertising on their channel will split the profits with TM. For instance, if Matt Russell, who will be heading up our music channel, can get someone to pay for $1000 worth of advertising on his channel, he just made 500 bucks. Food for thought, aye?

I’d also like to give a big thanks to CSS Mania, for sponsoring our design contest. They did us a huge solid and I’m sure the response would have been non-existent without their help!