Art Nate's banners.

[Nate]

Well, i haven't made any banners for a while that were posted up...so here we go.
This one is for Blanko. She said i could make one for her..so..i took a while, and the results is nothing like what i planed, but i like it. Comments and crituque, please.

[The Mac Attack]

I would consider this an okay banner, because unlike many other's I've seen, it's message is clear. Many people tend to make more complex, cluttered images crammed with their subject matter.

Also, you have considered the traditional artistic phrase "form follows function" by creating a banner which will not overly distract a reader from the text in a post e.g. like animated avatars do.

However, there are a few instances in which you could stand to improve. Firstly, I've been noticing with your banners in JPEG format, that you use a level of compression I would consider to be too high. The resulting images are not always outwardly pleasing to look at due to the lossy compression. Perhaps you could try using PNG formatting, as the resulting images will not lose quality.

Secondly, in order to create a balance in this banner, the top line of text should be more aligned to the center. At the moment it's leaning slightly to the left which disturbs the harmonics of the piece (disregard if it's supposed to be that way).

Lastly, if it's possible in the application you're using, make sure you're using anti-aliased text. This creates a better blend between the text and the surrounds. I would always recommend anti-aliasing for images displayed on screen and aliased for print media.

[Nate]

I'm using paint..i don't een think you can save PNG- wait, yes you can. I can't change the compression format...so..i have no idea how to do that. I'll save in PNG from now on. And what do you mean, anti-aliased text?

[The Mac Attack]

[quote][i]From [url]http://www.widearea.co.uk/designer/anti.html[/url][/i]
One of the most important techniques in making graphics and text easy to read and pleasing to the eye on-screen is anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is a cheaty way of getting round the low 72dpi resolution of the computer monitor and making objects appear as smooth as if they'd just stepped out of a 1200dpi printer (nearly).[/quote]

See the attachment for elaboration. The text at the top appears smooth against the background, whilst the text at the bottom appears jagged, and by comparison is not so pleasing to the eye.

I don't think it's really possible to use anti-aliased text in paint, so don't worry about it too much until you're using a more sophisticated application.

The level of compression in your current images won't improve by resaving the files in a different format now. In the future, I would recommend saving in the .PNG format.

Or, you could do as I do: Save the banner in a .BMP format first, and then resave in a compressed format. If I don't like how the file was compressed, I could open the BMP file and resave it again with a different level of compression. This BMP file can also be useful for making changes later on, without having to deal with the low image quality of a compressed file.

[Nate]

here's one i made to show off my new forums. I might use it in the future.