With regards to our website’s new design, the single biggest gripe heard from many (including from within the bunker) has to do with the naked header space. Where the banners at? People miss the variety and the colors previously found at the top. Why is the space so darn naked? Well, before answering that question I would like to explain a bit of the philosophy behind the site design. We have tried to make it a more community driven while still maintaining our editorial rights. When the news column was hidden away on its own separate tab it wasn’t being utilized to its maximum potential. Already, since our launch last week, I have been very happy with the quality of news links posted in the right hand column. People tend to step up their game and participate more when their submissions get more face time. We will continue to delete junk and spam from that column and the features (including comments) will soon be working. Likewise, the incorporation of Twitter allows us to communicate with and receive relevant tips from a much larger community.
And that brings us back to the missing banners. There was always a plan.
We are looking for submissions from the Sepia Mutiny community. We want artwork, several original designs, to adorn the top of our website. As with the banners, we hope to rotate the designs. Notice I said “artwork” and not just hastily designed graphics. We want you to wow us and blow SM readers away. This means you have to be pretty darn good at using Photoshop, Gimp, or the equivalent. Instructions follow below the fold.
INSTRUCTIONS:
We are not looking for rectangular art like the previous banners. Instead, the new art should fully integrate with the existing background leaving enough space around the SM logo and the search function. We are looking for mutinous art: something that speaks to the experience of being South Asian American, whether it be about politics, culture, entertainment, whatever. It could just be a really cool design that doesn’t speak to anything in particular but still captures the spirit of this blog in the mind of the artist. Except no Bollywood-only designs please. We reserve the right to be very picky in which ones we select for the website, although we appreciate the efforts of everyone that makes the time to try and submits something!
Here (native or compressed) is the template (.psd) you can download and work from. The submission has to be in the form of a PSD, PNG-24, or TIFF file. Please forward this post to your artist friends! Send submission to abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com.
Finally, if you want some examples of websites that do a great job of incorporating artwork into the header, I recommend viewing these examples:
http://www.timeforcake.com/
