Young Artists Have Until October 26 to Leave Their Mark on the Frisco Public Library's Annual Bookmark Contest

A Small Rectangle With a Big Tradition

Picture a second-grader hunched over a sheet of paper, tongue pressed to the corner of her mouth, coloring pencil moving with absolute conviction across a scene she has already decided is perfect: a Tyrannosaurus rex in an apron, flipping pancakes. She is not drawing for homework. She is drawing for the chance to have her work tucked inside every book that leaves the Frisco Public Library for the next year.

That is the quiet power of the library’s Annual Bookmark Contest — a tradition that asks Frisco’s youngest residents to imagine something small enough to slip between two pages, and in doing so, stamps their creativity onto the everyday reading life of an entire city.

The 2026 edition of the contest, which runs from September 28 through October 26, carries the theme “Dino’s Doing Everyday Things.” The deadline is now less than two weeks away, which means that for families who have not yet submitted an entry, the window is closing fast.

Why a Bookmark Contest Is About More Than Bookmarks

It would be easy to dismiss a bookmark contest as a minor footnote in a city calendar crowded with fall festivals, grand openings, and Halloween events. Frisco in October is not short on things to do. But the library’s contest occupies a different register than a pumpkin patch or a carnival game. It is not something a child experiences once and forgets by the drive home. The winning design gets reproduced and distributed — placed inside real books, checked out by real neighbors, carried into real homes across Frisco.

For a kid who wins, that is a form of publication. For a kid who enters and does not win, it is still a completed creative act, which is its own reward. The contest has run annually long enough that there are parents in Frisco today who entered it themselves as children, and who now sit beside their own kids at the kitchen table, talking about how to fit a dinosaur doing something mundane — grocery shopping, perhaps, or waiting for a school bus — into a rectangle roughly the size of an index card.

That continuity matters in a city that has grown as fast as Frisco has. When neighborhoods turn over and new families arrive every year, shared community rituals become one of the few threads that stitch an older Frisco to a newer one. A bookmark contest is a modest ritual, yes. But it is a consistent one.

”Dino’s Doing Everyday Things”

The theme this year is specific enough to spark an idea and open enough to allow genuine surprise. “Dino’s Doing Everyday Things” hands young artists a premise — dinosaurs, a species that carries its own built-in drama and visual personality, inserted into the ordinary textures of daily life — and asks them to find a scene within it.

The juxtaposition is inherently funny and inherently warm. A Brachiosaurus reaching over a grocery store shelf. A Triceratops at a crosswalk. A Stegosaurus reading a picture book, which, given the setting, lands as a small inside joke between the library and its youngest patrons. The theme does not require advanced technique. It rewards imagination, which is the one resource that eight-year-olds reliably have in abundance.

For educators, it also offers a natural classroom connection. Dinosaurs are a perennial anchor of early science curricula, and asking students to place prehistoric creatures in contemporary settings invites a quiet kind of thinking about time, change, and the strangeness of ordinary life.

Getting an Entry Submitted Before the Deadline

The contest closes on October 26, which on the calendar falls just two days after several of Frisco’s signature Halloween events. Families navigating a busy stretch of the fall social season may find it useful to treat the bookmark deadline as a pre-Halloween creative warm-up — something to complete in the days before costumes take over the weekend.

The Frisco Public Library is the place to go for entry forms, submission guidelines, and any specific requirements around paper size, medium, or age categories. The library’s own site at friscolibrary.com carries the details, and library staff have historically been generous with information for families who come in person with questions.

Libraries run on foot traffic, and the bookmark contest has always been one of the more effective reasons to bring a child through the doors. Even a family that arrives only to pick up an entry form tends to leave with a stack of books. That is not an accident.

What Frisco Looks Like When a Child Wins

The mechanics of what happens after the judging are worth pausing on. The winning design is not simply celebrated and then filed away. It is reproduced in quantity and inserted into the library’s circulating collection, where it will travel throughout the year — through the hands of toddlers, middle schoolers, retirees, new parents, and everyone else who borrows books from the Frisco Public Library.

In a city where the phrase “community connection” gets invoked constantly and sometimes hollowly, this is one of the less-heralded ways that connection actually happens. A child’s drawing, rendered in whatever medium she chose, moves through Frisco’s reading households without fanfare, doing its quiet work as a placeholder and as a small piece of civic art.

The library does not need a ribbon-cutting ceremony for this. It does not require a plaza or a press release. It just needs kids with crayons and a deadline, and Frisco — reliably, year after year — supplies both.

A Reminder Before the Calendar Flips

October 26 arrives sooner than it looks on a schedule packed with fall events. If there is a young artist in your household who has not yet started a dinosaur going about its business, the next ten days are the window. The Frisco Public Library is open, the theme is waiting, and somewhere in Frisco right now, there is almost certainly a kid who has already decided exactly what her Velociraptor is going to be doing.

Probably something very ordinary. Probably something that will make everyone smile.