I have discovered the secret.

November 5th, 2009

The secret to great website banners.

What started out as an experiment turned into a pretty cool way to find some totally sweet banners for my site. I came up with the idea after thinking It would be cool to have some pictures of dinosaurs and robots and space ships to use as a banner background. Having absolutely zero photos of any of those things, I turned to the next best source: Flickr. I started out doing random searches for single tags, but I wasn't finding anything worthy at all. It was mostly just portraits of people in front of dinosaur statues or people's home-made robotic experiments. Boring.

Having no way filter out tags from a search, my next thought was to search for pairs of tags. One tag would be the primary subject of my search (like a dinosaur), and the second tag would be something like a verb or photographic technique that might filter out portraits and other boring photos (like macro). The results were immediately improved. I set about creating two lists of words that when randomly paired up might produce interesting photos. The banner up above was the end product. So far I'm incredibly pleased with some of the results:

I'll admit that a lot of the photos which look good as a banner wouldn't even be considered great photography as photos on their own, but that doesn't even matter. The secret to transforming them into a great banner is simple: Offset by -50 pixels on both the X and Y axis and crop to 650 by 300 pixels. Instant background art.

It's not always this awesome, though. Even with this great formula for success at your fingertips, you'll still encounter some duds. To help remove terrible and/or inappropriate photos, I've implemented a system that will check to see if a photo has been viewed in the past, and if so, check it's voting score. Once a photo has reached a score of -3 (it has been given a thumbs-down three times), it will no longer appear on the site. Here's a few duds I'll be glad to never see again: