Friday, September 14, 2007

Bringing Sexy Back - New Weekly Crisis Banner!

Finally got around to updating the banner. Originally, I just stuck some generic font text with "The Weekly Crisis" on it and added a picture and uploaded it to the site just for the sake of having a banner. Spent the last week or so just casually working on a new one. Hit the jump to see the different variations I tried before settling on this one.


I liked the Steve McNiven image of Peter Parker, so I decided early on I was going to be keeping that regardless of what I chose. The image reminds me of someone trying to make a hard decision or confused about something and the Weekly Crisis is about solving your weekly crisis on what comics you should buy through the numerous reviews I write. So, I had to keep him in the banner. So, I started with my old banner and went to work designing the new one.



The "Original" - Again, just simple smooth font with the Parker image. It lacked any description as to the general purpose of the site and was pretty bad in hindsight.



First Attempt - I wanted a new font for the banner. I cycled through just about every font I had on Photoshop and finally came across the one I liked. I decided I wanted to go with an Amazing Spider-Man type "the", so I took it out and changed the font for it to the cursive style pictured here. This banner became the basis of what I wanted for the new one, but lacked colour and seemed far too mechanical and fell flat. I wanted the subtext on the new banner and, using the same font, but smaller size, added the general description to the banner for any one that randomly stumbled across it.


Second Attempt - Sticking with the Amazing Spider-Man motif, I tried a curved version of the title. I used various different curvatures, but it never really seemed to come together and I eventually scrapped this curved version and returned to the straight one from the first attempt.


Third Attempts - I quickly decided colour was needed to make this banner work. I went to work adding the blue colour I liked from my original banner's font and tried a basic Web 2.0 trick of colouring half the text in colour and the
left alone. The font looked odd if I left a space in the middle and that is where the hyphen came into play. It was a throwback to most comics, like Spider-Man and so on with hyphens randomly between words. I tried this with the dash as all black, white and blue, but it was still lacking something. During this time I eventually angled the 'the' and put it on the corner of the 'W' in 'Weekly', which is another comic standard.


Final Attempt - I was liking how it was coming together and decided to try and invert the 'Weekly' into an all black font. This came out really nicely and the title was really coming together. I did not like the white highlight effect around the 'Weekly' and quickly edited it out. I straightened out the font, moved the 'the' around a bit and came to the final version below.


I am quite pleased with the new banner. I think I did a pretty decent job. It is not overly flashy and retains a very comic book like feeling to it while telling people what this site is all about in a few short descriptors.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's really nice.

Hire me.

Kirk Warren said...

Thanks. I am not sure what you mean by the hire you part though.

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