Graphic and visual design
Not being artistically talented, I struggle to come up with designs and colour schemes that really work. I'm more of a coder or programmer, than I am a designer and it probably shows. My main design related focus is and probably always will be, to produce standards compliant pages that can be served out in the minimum of bandwidth and processor usage. I actually quite like the overall look of the SlashBoot dot org web site and for me, it is something of an achievement.
I've been fortunate enough to have been given advice from various people with some form of design experience, with the most valuable advice focusing on type sizing and line spacing. This has been gratefully taken onboard and implemented, as per their recommendations. Where I feel that I could use some extra help though, is in the logo design at the top of each page and for any minor graphics that go into the site.
Contributions welcomed
Therefore, I am asking for any budding or experienced graphic artists with a few minutes to spare, to come up with a logo for this site. If I spell out my intentions first and see where this might lead, I think that's probably the best way forward. As this is my personal web site and I make nothing from it, financially, I'm not willing to pay for a single image file but I am only too happy to give credit and a link to their own web site, for anybody who contributes a logo that I choose to use.
Site styles and colours
Firstly, I more or less class the site's house type face to be Courier fixed width and the house colour to be #666699. The existing logo is an attempt to make the text appear to be cut out from the background and a resulting shadow showing through. Ideally, I would like the type to be thicker or bolder, which I think would help to emphasise the drop shadow effect, instead of making the text look like it is solid and shaded. It needs to be 'cut out' of the purple (#666699) background, so that it blends in with the coloured strip at the top there. See what I mean?
I'd really appreciate any contributions that anybody wants to send in and as I say, I'm happy to give you credit and a link to your own web site, for your troubles. I've not asked for this kind of input before now, so it will be very interesting to see if I get any responses and if so, the standard of those contributions. For now, it would probably be best to contact me via this route, enclosing a URL to the image file you are contributing. If needs be, you can email it in to logo [at] slashboot d()t org, whatever suits you best. I'd prefer .png format if possible, rather than me converting it over. Oh and for what it is worth, I use The Gimp for my graphics needs.
Many thanks in advance for any contributed logos or advice sent in on this matter.
I've taken some colour related advice and bitten the bullet, resulting in a range of 15 logo variations that I knocked up when I had a spare hour. They add up to around 100KB per page view for the binary background image and the larger files, used for the "SlashBoot" textual logo. I hope to optimise the images a bit, when I get the chance. However, considering my general lack of ability with anything graphical, I'm quite pleased with the overall effect.
As I say, there are 15 logo images in all, with one of them being chosen at random, for each page view. I might well spend a bit of time putting some more together, when I have the time to hunt down some more decent fonts and then create the logos using them.
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