A new forum banner? Submit ideas here

Many seem in favour of a banner redesign. Unfortunately, I seem to have unintentionally set a mandate of having a banner merely including three or four "cultural icons", when really we should probably have around 30 or more in the banner to reflect the scope of our discussions.

Thus, this topic is for banner submissions and also suggestions as to what and who should feature in the banner. Maybe a shortlist of 30-40 cultural icons/films/books/albums would be a good place to start, so that we know what to include in any banner designs.

Ideas?

I'd like a banner that heavily focuses on pop culture, if we can't have it purely based on Bond.

Something like what LS designed in one of the other threads. Personally, I'd like to see:

James Bond
Ian Fleming (either himself, or reference to his books)
Mad Men/Christina Hendricks
Keira Knightley/Penelope Cruz/Marion Cotillard/Gemma Arterton
The Beatles
Bobby De Niro/Retro Scorsese Flick

Or a banner like this if it's all James Bond:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9hq0418Rn1qzt9pao1_500.jpg

The banner needs a photo of Fleming, plain and simple. Perhaps use an interesting quote from one of the novels, or even one of SKYFALL's "old ways work best" quotes.

damned if I could quotes by the man himself, well...many quotes.

Control wrote:

The banner needs a photo of Fleming, plain and simple. Perhaps use an interesting quote from one of the novels, or even one of SKYFALL's "old ways work best" quotes.

Indeed. I'd be all for this too. Especially the Fleming quotes.

The emphasis can't be solely on Bond, not even in the banner. A banner is needed which will draw all kinds of media/culture/news enthusiasts into this place to give us the fresh blood and new personalities desperately needed here. To use a Fleming banner would be making no progress at all from what we have already. However, Fleming as part of a 30-40 pic cultural icon montage banner would be a way to include Fleming yet simultaneously broaden our reach.

Throwing the kitchen sink into the banner isn't the best idea, in my opinion. Looked pretty tacky last time around.

Text-only and keeping it simple might work well for us. Or how about photos of locations around the world, as we're a pretty diverse group?

Shame we don't have any graphic designers or illustrators here to contribute.

I agree with M, although I think 30-40 pics is overkill. It just needs to be bold, simple, and with a colour scheme distinct from all of the other Bond fan forums. i.e. yellow, orange or green.

I know a Fleming quote would be ideal, but I don't think there's one that applies to B&B. A Latin phrase might work - maybe "Per Angusta ad Augusta" - from hardships to greatness. But I like Dragonpol's suggestion best - "Where all other Bond forums end, this one begins." Either that or a riff on ZARDOZ:

Beyond Cb.n

Beyond MI6

Beyond Love

Beyond Death

BOND AND BEYOND

How about a banner with, as M suggested, a barrage of everything culturally relevant that gets (or could get) discussed here? We could either lay the banner out in a full-on Sgt Pepper style or go for an Exile On Main Street style (the pics in b&w, faded out a bit, then the forum title printed over them in a striking font/colour). I'm sure that's what M was referring to as "point of sale", in that even if a fan of somebody as far-flung from our radar as, say, Beyonce or Lady Gaga, should visit our forums, they'd feel there may be something here for them. We'll only catch fish by casting the net properly, casting it far enough and loading it with enough variety of bait.

40 cultural icons/images, identifiable enough to both the masses and the cultural conoisseur? Okay, I'll try....

James Bond (gunbarrel or Connery, something classic)
Superman (logo or Man Of Steel image)
Batman
The Godfather (Brando image)
Rocky Balboa image
Scarface (covers both Pacino & DePalma)
2001 or A Clockwork Orange poster image
Truffaut
Spielberg
Citizen Kane image
Blade Runner image
Alien image
Avengers (Marvel) image
Hobbit book cover image
Lolita book cover image
Ian Fleming image
Daniel Craig image
John Barry
Alfred Hitchcock
Michael Caine as Jack Carter
Bowie in Man Who Fell To Earth
Madonna
The Beatles
Bogart
Monroe
Elvis
Smiths/Morrissey
Dylan
U2
Lady Gaga
Star Trek
Star Wars
Daft Punk
The Muppets
Beyonce
Obama
Thatcher/Cameron/The Queen/Royal image
Soldier on battlefield image
Premiership football image
Newspaper headline image

That lot covers cinema, literature, music, TV, news and sport. Would love to see someone take a crack at that banner, unless I get the time to try it myself.

Control wrote:

Throwing the kitchen sink into the banner isn't the best idea, in my opinion.

Until we get a professional graphic designer on the case (such as Richard Hannay/Jobe - who I contacted yesterday) - a 'please everyone' collage of cultural icons is just going to look ugly and cluttered.

This is what I put together a few weeks ago:

Likewise, this was mine.



I'm not happy with it, TBH. I don't like the colours or the cluttered pics. I think we should stay away from the collage approach. Keep the number of images in the banner to a bare minimum.

Largo's Shark wrote:

I agree with M, although I think 30-40 pics is overkill. It just needs to be bold, simple, and with a colour scheme distinct from all of the other Bond fan forums. i.e. yellow, orange or green.

I know a Fleming quote would be ideal, but I don't think there's one that applies to B&B. A Latin phrase might work - maybe "Per Angusta ad Augusta" - from hardships to greatness. But I like Dragonpol's suggestion best - "Where all other Bond forums end, this one begins." Either that or a riff on ZARDOZ:

Beyond Cb.n

Beyond MI6

Beyond Love

Beyond Death

BOND AND BEYOND

I'm very much in agreement on this, LS. It seems we're singing off the same hymn sheet, I'm very glad to say! Keeping it simple is indeed the way forward.

You could change my banner signature/tag-line to "Where all other (discussion) forums end, this one begins" if you wanted it to be more about culture in general and less about James Bond in particular (as you do, under M's dictum).

I think taglines are corny.

This post serves no purpose other than to really just give us an idea as to what a pastel-based scheme would or banner could look like.

Jack Wade wrote:

This is what I put together a few weeks ago:

Any chance of putting one of these superb efforts together wibth, say, 20 of the key cultural icons Laz mentioned, but with smaller circles and a rectangular space in the centre for the forum title to sit?

Sure. I'll throw something together.

I don't think any politicians should show up on the banner.

Control wrote:

I don't think any politicians should show up on the banner.

* apart from Enoch Powell and Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Dragonpol wrote:

Control wrote:

I don't think any politicians should show up on the banner.

* apart from Enoch Powell and Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Or Robert Mugabe.

M wrote:

Jack Wade wrote:

This is what I put together a few weeks ago:

Any chance of putting one of these superb efforts together wibth, say, 20 of the key cultural icons Laz mentioned, but with smaller circles and a rectangular space in the centre for the forum title to sit?

* And try to feature a yellow background and black text spelling CULTUREVOX.

Largo's Shark wrote:

Dragonpol wrote:

Control wrote:

I don't think any politicians should show up on the banner.

* apart from Enoch Powell and Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Or Robert Mugabe.

Why not Mussolini? No...oh, sorry. Wrong forum.

M wrote:

Jack Wade wrote:

This is what I put together a few weeks ago:

Any chance of putting one of these superb efforts together wibth, say, 20 of the key cultural icons Laz mentioned, but with smaller circles and a rectangular space in the centre for the forum title to sit?

How about also adding a nice snap of Kingsley Amis as one of Britain's leading novelists of the C20th? I think a classic snap of Amis would be a nice throw-back touch. There's also a crafty Bond link there too.

Fitting 20 images into a banner is proving troublesome and very cluttered.

I thought so.