I didn't think the logo thing really got out of hand in any way, but YMMV. Everyone seemed to be trying to pre-empt any "this is not fair" responses, and no one responded that way.
Anyway, here are a couple ideas stolen from a comic board I used to frequent. One is a "question of the week" for the General RPG board, where questions are submitted by posters (to the mods) for open discussion. This may seem superfluous, but I think it stimulates posters to think about interesting discussion topics, and may add a bit more emphasis to those topics.
The other thing that was done on that board was (and I don't know how you'd feel about this, given the logo debate) a banner of the week. We have a lot of graphics-savvy posters here, who would probably submit some interesting EN World banners. Of course, which ones actually get chosen are up to the mods. You might do this on just one forum, if not all of them.