Designing "sleek" & "cool" banners for e-mail use has become a real hobby of mine, particularly after acquiring a digital camera and using my own pictures. (Consecutively, the banner output has dropped sharply after my camera became defunct...) I was partly inspired by the annoying experience of receiving huge e-mail image attachments, which took ages to download and hence turned out to be very impractical for e-mail use. I wanted to have images that fit the readers' e-mail box, show up immediately, are less than 100 KB and convey a pleasant or useful message.
Recently, it has become difficult to use these banners, since many have introduced filters that keep any embedded image files away from their inbox. Hope I will tackle this new challenge! Please give me some useful hints. I noticed that some spammers are able to get through the filters with image-like messages... My pledge however is: I don't want to abuse my reader's trust and lure them into buying some fishy products, I just want to convey my messages in a pleasant & eye catching manner...
Here are some samples!
This is a funny Easter banner, which I circulated in 2005. I was philosophizing around the issue of perception, and remembered the "four blind mice". The banner shows them with a fifth mouse, which I actually consider the "seeing" one...
This banner was taken on two occasions from the same bridge at the lake of Zurich, Switzerland. I spent almost two months there on new assignments. This was shortly after the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in late December 2004. I wanted to bring out the peaceful atmosphere, but also show the stark difference between winter and spring.
This is an early attempt at banner design, an Eid greetings banner for all my Muslim relatives and friends (I am the unrecognized Muslim, by the way - refer to one of my future blogs for this!).
The citation from the Qran at the top of the banner is actually a "translation" of the calligraphy, which is at the same time very modern and very ancient, referring to some Arabic font styles of the middle ages.
I soon abandoned vertical banners, since they are not reader-friendly.
This was one of my first banners in 2003. I took the pattern from a friend's website. She is a mosaic artist and has created many unusual, fantastic works of art in public places, parks and gardens.
These are my kids! I did this banner, since I was too lazy to send individual pics of my children to friends, and I kept it ready on my desktop, so I could easily drag it into any e-mail when responding to "how are your kids...".
Actually, a renewal is due now with updates, since Tamara turned 14 recently and Naaz is just about to turn 24...
Ehem, this is also an allusion to me as an unrecognized adoptionist (if this term exists).... another blog post then! 3 of the 4 are my "physical" kids, and one is "adopted".
This postcard was designed in Forcalquier, in Haute Provence, France, during our summer holiday there in 2006. Lurs is a medieval village on top of a hill, and I have spent many holidays there while my uncle and aunt had a house there (you can see it in the shade on the right of the clock tower).
The picture was taken by my son Andreas, and we did some patching up to erase a signboard in the foreground.
This banner was hardly circulated - a limited edition so to speak. I did it on Pentecost weekend itself, when I was at my mother's home. I stole the flower, a Pentecost rose, from the Internet and did some research into its meaning and health benefits...
Many of my current banners are work and project related. Actually, each event that I organize or am somehow involved in, gets its own banner!
They have proven to be quite effective communicators, and their circulation can go into thousands, depending on the event partners and their mailing lists, and of course depending on the mood of the recipients, who might spread them further among their friends.
This one is for the exhibition opening of "Oasis of Silence" (ref. www.oasisofsilence.net) in Bangkok, Thailand.
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