be_compromised | Community Banner Challenge: February

In light of the lovely Santa Hats community banner we’ve had for the merry months of Secret Santa 2012 and the fact that our original banner was looking a little shabby, we have a proposal for you: a banner challenge.

Here’s the plan: we set you a theme on the first of each month. People then make banners and comment with them to that month’s post – all comments will be screened; comments without banners in them will then be unscreened. There will be a limit for sending banners in, something like two to three weeks. Then we’ll post all of the banners anonymously and everyone in the community can vote for their favourite (including the makers, but you do only get one vote each). That new banner is then our banner for the following month.

At the moment we’re thinking of doing this monthly, and we have a list of possible themes for every month of the year, but depending on interest it might change to seasonally or another time frame. (I’ve seen the shiny things that people in this community can make though and I’m hoping that it’ll happen monthly :D )

The Rules:
1) Everyone is invited to play, seriously, everyone, the more the merrier!
2) Banners must be safe for work.
3) Banners must have a width of 800 and a height of 350 and Preferably a png or jpg file.
4) We will make your banners anonymous, so please don’t tell or show anyone what you’ve made. Once the winner has been chosen though you’re free to share your banner wherever you like. (So, for example, if you make a banner for February’s challenge you’ll be free to do whatever you like with it from March 1st.)
5) When new films come out (Iron Man 3, Thor 2) please don’t use images from those until we say it’s safe so no one gets spoiled!
6) You can submit no more than 3 banners (for now, we'll see how much interest we get).

February’s Challenge: This is the month of St Valentine’s Day and the name of our community is Love Is For Children, so for this month the theme is ‘love’. This could be romantic, realistic, harsh, assassin love, any kind of love, just a banner with Clint, Natasha, and love.

February Deadline: You have until Friday 25th January to comment to this post with your banners or links to your banners. (Apologies for the short time frame this month, but January has already begun and we need to post the banners that weekend/Monday to give people a bit of time to vote.)

As stated, all comments to this post will be screened. Comments that don’t contain banners will be unscreened. So feel free to post banners, ask questions, give us feedback, and all that jazz :)

EDIT: in answer to questions below, you can submit no more than 3 banners and everyone, including makers, gets one vote.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This is a lovely idea, especially since we do have some very talented people in the community when it comes to graphics.

Ooh what a wonderful idea! I'm in favor of anything that gets creativity going, and the people here are indeed so very creative! :)

This seems like the opportune time to do what I've been wanting to do for awhile, which is to jump on the graphic art bandwagon :D however....I'm kind of at a loss on where to start....(and if it'll be better to have this be a post of its own to the community at large I can do that too! :)

Is photoshop the only option? Are there other programs? Which one is the best/easiest? How do I obtain these programs? Free or paid downloads? in disc form? :/ idek...

So any help is appreciated :) and if you think its better to make my own post I will.

Thanks in advance! Again, awesome idea!

Hey you! About your question - as I've never had the money to actually buy photoshop, I started using GIMP. A lot of people mope and whine about it not being as good and all that. Fact is though, once you got the hang of it, you can achieve basically the same results with it.

So, I'd say, give GIMP a try and if you have questions, just go ahead! I'd happily help you any wuay I can. The next couple of days I'll be very busy, but after that - what ever you wanna know :D

Hey back :) oooh thanks for the info! Yeah I.... Don't really have money for it either :/ so yay free downloads! Especially if ultimately the results are the same/comparable!

I'm busy this weekend too, but I will be checking GIMP out as soon as I'm done with work next week! :D and I will probably have some newbie questions as I figure it out.... So I will definitely take you up on that offer for help/advice! If thats still ok ;)

*hugs* thank you again!! :)

Being a maker of graphics, is it ok if I add my two cents in?

Photoshop is most definitely not the only option if your interested in a program. I personally use Gimp, which you can download for free online (at gimp . org-- without the spaces). It takes a little getting used to all the tools, but LJ has some very handy and helpful tutorials (for example, icon_tutorial is a good one I know of, and you can use tags for the different graphics programs, as well as coloring, basic, etc. questions and resources to get a quick answer.)

Also, if you're not interested in downloading anything, there's a few websites you can look into. One is called Picmonkey, and it has a whole bunch of effects and texts you can play around with. The other is Photobucket (a good host for your pictures), which has a photo editor built into the site.

oh dude I will take all the cents you want to give!! ;) I figured photoshop wasn't the only option, but yeah had no idea where to start. So thank you for the advice! Oh, tutorials will be most beneficial!! I will check that group out after I download the program next week! I have no qualms with downloading things, but I will still check out those other websites too, just to have multiple options.

I'm sure I'll have more questions once I've had time to play around with the program, but for right now this is a great start! *hugs* thanks again! :)

YAY! Fellow GIMP user! I can only agree - there really is no use for Photoshop if you just want to make fandom graphics. Good to see fellow GIMPers out there ;)

*raises hand* I have GIMP too, although I don't know what I'm doing with it half of the time. I use Photobucket as a place to store graphics rather than edit them. LJ scrapbook can be good for that as well, particularly for larger images since if you don't have a paid photobucket sometimes it'll resize things. And I use Picmonkey at lot - the first real graphics program I played with was it's predecessor, Picnik :) All of these are free and I highely recommend Picmonkey as a self-explanatory, easy place to start if you don't want to dive right in *grins*.

And feel free to do posts about things like this at any time - the creative support group tag can be for graphics help and not just writing :)

Thank you for all the info/advice!! :) Now that my laptop is up and running again I will be checking all of these out! and, yeah for some reason I assumed "creative support group" was just for writing, silly me! now I know :) thanks again!

Just thought I'd jump in and offer you the same I did the others - if you need/want any GIMP advice, I'd gladly help out :)

Thanking you! To be honest, I mostly just play with picmonkey, but I'll come running if I want to play with GIMP more and get stuck :)

You're just loving the challenges, aren't you? xD But YAY, graphic challenges! Once I've settled here and all that, I'll be all over that :D

"settled here"? did you get that London job???

Well, we have lots of writing challenges and things, and I discovered that we have some brilliant banner makers in these here parts ;D

Oh wow! This is huge! I can't wait! It'll be a fun challenge for sure! :D

I’ve got two stupid questions:

1)How many banners can we each hand in? Is it strictly one banner per person or is it possible to hand in more than one?

2)Are people who handed in banners allowed to vote for their favourite, too? I guess as long as there is a rule that you shouldn’t vote for your own banner that would be ok, right?

Not stupid at all! I've never done anything like this before, so it's all a learning curve :)

1) I'm going to say three per person, subject to change depending on how much interest we get.

2) The plan is to do a poll to choose your favourite, which means one vote each, so everyone gets one vote and if people want to vote for themselves that's between them and their conscience (and how good they think their banner is *grins*).

And now I'm gonna update the main post with this because good questions :D

Firstly, I have to say that this is a wonderful idea :)

And now, to business - do you want some kind of community identifier on the banners?

YAY! Hopefully we'll get lots and lots of interest and be able to do it for the whole year :D

Banners can look like and have whatever text, or not, that you like on them, as long as they meet the criteria outlined in the post :)

Community Banner Challenge: February

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