Let's All Create a New Banner

[teh yoshi]

Some of the staff and I have been getting together, and we thought this place could use something new. We need a new look, although we'd be keeping the whole blue thing going on.

Anyway, I believe that this kind of change is not something we can do on our own, and it should all start with you! What we need is some contributions to new banners for Yoshi's Corner. They'll be rotating, so a different banner will appear every time you refresh the page.

The rules are simple. The banner should be 650 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall, the same size as the maximum dimensions for a signature image. It should depict Yoshi(s) in his wholesome goodness (no characters, just regular Yoshis). You can decide whatever colored Yoshi(s) should appear and doing anything that's deemed family-friendly, like eating melons, playing a game, just a simple portrait, or whatever that's banner-worthy. Preferably these banners should have backgrounds and well framed. It needs to also say Yoshi's Corner on it, of course, in large typography.

We'll take any amount of banners you submit as long as they're good and set it up for rotation. The more the better! You can even sign your name on it so people will know who designed it. So be creative and help us build a more homely Yoshi community!

"Hup!" ;D

[Yoshiken]

Absolutely awesome. I will definitely join in, but expect mine to be submitted probably later than everyone elses XD. I am always late with these things. This is a start to a fantastic Forum experience, to say the least.

[teh yoshi]

There really isn't a deadline. It's an ongoing thing.

[Shoe]

Cool, something to do today besides dishes. I'm totally in. Dibs on anyone who wants to just color line art. I don't think I'm very good at that, so a collaboration would be snazzy.

[Blitzzoshi]

Eep, how'd I miss this one? I could have sworn that I suggested a rotating banner at one point. Glad to see it finally becoming a reality.

Assuming I can sketch something decent I'll try my hand at this. Hope you will be accepting pixel art.

[teh yoshi]

Heh, since you missed this, then maybe I should sticky this. This is, after all, an ongoing community project.

And of course, we'll be accepting all kinds of groovy art.

[Sanjo]

Awesome! I have a pretty good idea in mind, so I'll try to give it a shot!

[anjilfan]

I could... try.

[Newt]

Heh, I'll go ahead and give it a shot. But knowing me, I'll probably take about five or ninety years to create it...

[Arctic Yoshi]

Yay, new banner. This place has had the same one for ages now, it could probably use a face lift like this.

[Blitzzoshi]

Sooo, basically everyone is like "Yay, Yoshi's Corner is getting a makeover!" and then a week later, absolutely nothing happens, so I'm going to try and rectify that (and I'll likely fail at that, but whatever) by providing material in here, along with a draft or two of my banner.

For the sake of consistency, if you want a text logo, you can model your paths after this:
chaos.foxmage.com/AkuKitsune/yc/YCTextOutlineRaster.png

It's raster, but only because Paint Shop Pro seems incapable of exporting vector images even when there are no raster layers. The egg also lacks spots, because PSP8 doesn't offer much in the way of vector manipulation. I'll remake it as a Scalable Vector Graphic and give the egg spots in Inkscape (since it supports boolean path operations, which I need to clip the area of each spot that lies outside the egg).

Anyways, I was gonna just use the Chlorinap font, but that's more Mario Bros., and after I checked the Yoshi's Island boxart I found that it uses a different typeface. It was used as a reference for "Yoshi's" (adjusted slightly for purposes of copyleft), and I constructed "Corner" from my basic, limited typography analysis of the existing text. Hopefully it'll be useful to... someone.

[Yoshi]

Hey guys, definitely not bad on those banners. If you guys can give it a background and color it, I'll put it up in rotation right away! Hope to see more of them soon!

[Blitzzoshi]

Well, John, this isn't going to be the complete banner. This here is only the text logo and I'm going to use it for when I do the real banner. I was actually going to do the layout similar to Zyph's, but now that he's posted his own, I'll probably just swap Yoshi over to the right side in mine.

I redid the logo in Inkscape, and gave the egg spots. The logo is plain on purpose, since everyone will probably have their own art style, and might pick a fill style or whatever that would better fit with their banner. Here it is in SVG format (any major browser should be able to view it, unless said browser is Internet Explorer - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics#Support_for_SVG_in_web_browsers).

chaos.foxmage.com/AkuKitsune/yc/YCLogoTextVector.svg

PNG version:

chaos.foxmage.com/AkuKitsune/yc/YCLogoTextVector.png

[teh yoshi]

Here's a little something I made in an hour:

I'm not THAT creative when it comes to designing just about anything, but it's a start, no?

[Rackinac]

Ho snap, made one royal rainboooooooooow. I'll make a nicer, crisper banner to suit the board more but I really like bright and messy drawings, hahaha.

[teh yoshi]

Well, the first banners are up for rotation, but it appears to only be working in the front page.
As of right now, all the coders in the world are sleeping, so it looks like we're kind of stuck with this momentarily.

TEHDIT: I'm aware that as much as the front page looks kind of glitchy, so does how the coding work when modifying the forum skin. The same code to randomize banners only works in the Main Header and not the Global Header, which should explain why we're only seeing it in the front page only and not everywhere else.

[Blitzzoshi]

Who says you have to modify the page to make the banner rotate? Just have your template point at a fake image (note: see bottom).

Create a file, name it .htaccess and place something like this in it:
Redirect /directory/r.png http://mysite.com/directory/r.php

Ignore the url tags. Seems Proboards is stupid and wants to insert them in between code tags!

And a PHP script I stole found somewhere that spits out the randomly chosen image:

Only concern yourself with the switch/case statement right there. When adding new images, remember to change the random value range.

Problem with this technique is that the image isn't cached, which means it'll download every single time the page is accessed, which can be detrimental to bandwidth.

On second thought, this method is probably a terrible idea.

Edit: Yeah, this method sucks.

[Blitzzoshi]

Mine will probably take forever. Haven't even finished the outlines yet! Yay pixel art!

[Misphinxterator]

Here's mine.



I remembered to sign it.

[teh yoshi]

Jojora, I don't like the font of choice here.

I won't put it up unless you fix that.