Whatever your feelings about Newcastle Brown Ale, it is perceived as one of the classic English brown ales and its label is one of the most recognizable.

So I was surprised to see that Newcastle is sponsoring a contest to redesign their iconic label. The contest is known as Your Beer Your Label and gives you two ways to create a new label, either using their online label generator or download a template and have at it with your favorite graphics software (or at least Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop).

The Online Design Tool is actually pretty fun to use and you can do quite a bit of manipulation using it, as evidenced by the many submitted designs.

Unfortunately, the contest ends tomorrow, so if you want to play around or submit your own, you better get cracking.

Though you can still look at the submitted designs and vote for your favorite until the end of March.

Though in the end I wish they were going to do a run of bottles with the winner’s design or, better still, with the top few vote-getters. I think that would have been cool. But instead all the winners get is displayed on Newcastle’s website which seems like a pretty poor payoff for all the effort.

Oh, well, perhaps it’s just as well, as despite some very cool label designs submitted, the label below is currently at the top of the heap with the most votes cast. I guess that either says something about human nature or the demographics of Newcastle drinkers.