Id put some sort of mix of both. Judges make the final decision, but take the votes into account.
Not professionnal judges, just a few people (or just one guy, even) who wouldnt participate in the challenges and would judge the entries instead. Keeping the votes would make the decision-making easier and prolly much faster.

If there are enough entries, they could even end up giving special mentions for pixels that didnt win top 3, but had other special things, like a mention for creativity and a technical mention (for things like color restriction, use of restricted palettes...)
I dunno, just throwing some ideas around. Just thought it was a shame to have 20+ entries, and only spotlight three of them.

I personally feel like voting is better than judging. Because then you feel like the award is truly coming from the community, not just some random four or so people who may be biased towards you.

@TINC:  Pretty damn funny, funny man.

Regarding judges:   I think it would be very difficult to get a reasonable number of judges to rank the pieces week after week.  Perhaps we'll have special challenges with guest judges in the future. For now, I just want to get the weekly challenge flowing bug free for a few weeks. 

Keep the suggestions coming!

Aramax: Pixelation 4 u! (Although i kinda agree)
Silly Sedge, but we love you for it. However i get the feeling there's some sneaky business going on..

yay! i got apologized at!

i have no clue why though....

Or perhaps hire a crack team of astronauts to go into space and rearrange the stars to spell "pixeljoint".
That's within our budget, right?

Like the votes of a bunch of internauts really mean anything.

Sedgemonkey, You should really hire a bunch of professional judge or peoples who have time to really rate every art pieces one by one... maybe with the help from the community to point out those who deserve the most to be rated.

It's really not a place to be making jokes, Berta. This is a tragic scene of vandalism. *sniffle*

Hello

I'm not complaining.  Thanks for the fix sedge.

Dang! I thought I'd made the top three both times! How wrong I was. Oh well, I suppose the new results make a little more sense.

damn :|

oh well, i would rather get a legit award than one that was wrong.  congrats to the actual winners

Ugh,  I feel really bad about this guys.  I was so obsessed with writing an anti-votespam tool that I kind of lost track of legit votes.