I've been planning to advertise a bit on TMC or TMS, to see if that could help our waning playerbase, but to do that, I need a 4D banner first. There are also other situations in which a Banner or Logo would be useful. For instance, we just joined a new website,
http://mudgamers.com. If you check out the front page of that, you'll see that the Muds displayed all have a square icon or logo placed in front of the name. Presently we don't have either.
4D could really do with both a banner and a logo, in fact it would be great if we had several to choose from. And since I am not very computer savvy myself, I'd like to see if we have any artistic and/or knowledgeable players who could help with that. In fact, it would be great if we could get more than one good submission, then we could run a different banner each month to get a bit extra attention.
The design should in some way reflect the character and theme of the Mud, but there are really no restrictions. It could be purely text - (in which case the design and typography gets very important), or it could have some artwork, either in the form of a background or some figures - (in which case imagination, humour and drawing talents comes into play).
'Artistic' and 'knowledgeable' doesn't even have to be in the same person, the banner could well be the result of a teamwork.
As an example, Iwku, (who's currently on long-term vacation), has worked with an idea that I think has potential, but still needs some more development on the typography, format and file size, (which neither Iwku nor myself know enough about as of yet).
About the technical requirements:
TMC states the following about ad banners:
The banner should be between 360x72 and 468x60.
The physical file size of an ad banner should not exceed 36 Kilobytes.
MudGamers say that any submitted images will be resized to 80 x 80 pixels.
I don't think the file format , i.e. gif, jpg, bmp, png, etc. matters, but then again, I am no expert on the subject.
Anyhow, we'll make a competition of it, with the Staff, and maybe some prominent players in the jury. And we'll pay quite well, for whatever we can use, not in money, but in Quest Tokens.