Vox Design Blog

Thanks to all who entered the Vox Valentine's Day Banner contest! The great response and wonderful entries we received during the duration of such a short contest (only three days) makes us want to follow up with another contest in the very near future.

Here are the five banners that Team Vox will be making into themes for the next release:

 

  

Congratulations to those who made the cut. We'll be contacting you to get the layered version of your banner and your address for the schwag.

If you entered to V-Day contest and didn't win, you can still let people use your great banner (and they were all great -- we're not just saying that). Tag your post "share this banner" and folks will know that they can use your banner as part of personalized themes.

Modern Love

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With Valentine's Day approaching, you could probably imagine that we're already working on slipping a heart or two in some of the themes we'll be shipping soon. But since we know how creative all you guys have been with your own personalized banners, it makes sense to hold a Vox Valentine's Day Banner Contest!

Vox Shirt

Be creative! Be unique! The five banners that Team Vox likes best will be turned into themes and be included in a pre-Valentine's Day release that all Vox members will able to use.

The five top banner winners will not only be memorialized for all to see in our theme gallery but will also receive some cool Vox schwag (including a Vox T-Shirt!).

Get designing! The deadline is soon: 11:59 PM (Pacific Time), Friday, January 26, 2007.

To get started:

• Download this banner graphic. You must have graphics software that will allow you to open a layered Photoshop file. A 30-day free trial of Adobe Photoshop is available here.
• The banner may expand in height to accommodate a lengthy Blog Name or Description. Do not use photographs or illustrations that are cropped at the top of the banner. Photographic elements should blend into a solid color at the top of the graphic. Because the Blog Name and Description are important elements, readability and legibility is key. You can maximize readability of the Blog Name and Description by keeping visual elements either below or to the right of the Blog Name and Description.
• After creating your design, save your layered file. Create another copy and save it as a flattened .jpg, .gif, or .png.
• Upload the flattened image and tag the image "Vox VDay Banner Contest" and we'll find your entries.  (You must tag the image.  If you write a post as well, please also tag the post.)
  

Judging
The Vox Design Team will judge all entries. Entries will be judged on the following criteria:

• Originality and uniqueness
• Creativity
• Appeal to a broad audience
• Appropriateness to the Vox design aesthetic

And now some rules:

1. All entries must be submitted by 11:59 P.M. (Pacific Time) on Friday, January 26, 2007. Unfortunately, we cannot review late submissions. Submit entries by tagging the image "vox vday banner contest"
2. You may submit as many entries as you would like.
3. Any Vox user is welcome to submit an entry.
4. Because we only use HTML text on Vox published blogs, we do not allow graphical text in our banners.
5. Please select a system font that is available on a wide variety of computers. We have found that Helvetica, Arial, Trebuchet MS, Lucida Grande, Century Gothic, Franklin Gothic, Georgia, and Verdana work best.
6. You must own the copyright on any images or graphics used in your entry. Entries must not include images that infringe upon someone else's copyright, trademark, or license.
7. Entries must not include images that are unlawful, harmful, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, the determination of which is up to the sole discretion of the contest organizers.
8. We reserve the right to use your banner and graphics in other Six Apart blogging services and platforms such as TypePad, LiveJournal, and Movable Type.  Stay tuned to the Team Vox blog where we will announce the winners on Monday, January 29 at 5:00 P.M. (PDT).

Share This Banner

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Want to share your theme with other users? Just tag the image that you want to share "Share This Banner." 

Important: Before you decide to share, however, make sure that you own the copyright to the image. That means you created the banner from scratch using elements you own (illustrations, photos, drawings). If you purchase a image from a stock photo service like iStockPhoto, you don't own the copyright (even if you purchased it), so make sure those images aren't in your banner. If you own the content, share away!

We'll highlight banners here in Vox Design.

We're glad you could make it!

We're so excited to release custom/personalized banners to Voxers since it's such a great way for you guys to show your creativity. We can't wait to see all the neat things you guys come up with!

To use custom banners:

1. Create and upload your graphic to Vox. Do this the same way that you would upload any image to Vox.
2. Go to Vox's design section and select "Personalized."
3. Pick the custom palette (we've included 66 combinations and will be adding more in future releases) that works best with your graphic.

We've created this blog as a place for tips and tricks on designing custom headers. Additionally, we want to spotlight  great banners that Voxers create, as well as want to share with the Vox world.

For our first post, Lilia (a member of Six Apart who's the theme gate keeper) has produced a list of five tips for creating custom banners:

1. Banners can have a maximum size of 940px (width) by 200px (height). If your banner is smaller than this, then your banner will be aligned to the bottom right.
2. Use jpg, png, or gif format for the banners. Jpg works best for photo-based banners, while gif and png format work best with flat illustrations.
3. At this time, you cannot change the text color of the custom banner theme, so you’ll have to adapt your design to work. You can see the banner text color in the palette thumbnail. If your banner has a dark colored background, then the Black and Dark Grey palettes work best since the banner text is white.
4. Because the Blog Name and Description are fixed on the left side, concentrate your design on the right side of the banner. This ensures maximum readability of your Blog Name and Description.
5. File sizes should be under 35kb so that they load quickly and visitors to your blog won’t have to wait long for your banner to load.

Welcome!