I was recently surfing the net and came across an artistic and eye-catching conference banner for PyCon Argentina 2012. I thought it was good marketing so I wanted to think about ways these banners could get a wider distribution, sort of like the conference ribbons people put on their blogs. To get wider distribution, I think it would be useful if more conferences made banners in one or more standard sizes. This way websites can feature them regularly and rotate between upcoming conferences. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any more in my brief look but I liked the graphics for YAPC::Asia 2012 so I whipped up a banner from the website graphics. Both are shown below.
If these became more widespread, websites could start using them routinely. One website where I think these can be used is Grokbase, a mailing list archive covering a few open source projects. Grokbase already links to project websites and IRC channels but there’s still a good amount of open space on the discussion pages that I think could be used to promote open source projects and communities, with this being a possible way to both promote the community and add some color to the pages.
What do you think? Do you like it when conferences have custom graphics design work done? Should more open source conferences have display banners that websites can use for promotion? Would you place something like this on your websites? And is this a good use of the open space on Grokbase?
Update
I thought Gabor‘s comment on creating a few more banners was a good one so I added a few more to get a feel for what a larger collection could look like which are provided below.
After a brief conversation with Gabor, two things struck me as essential to make this project successful:
- Ease of creating banners: While the banners are easy for me to create in a graphics editor, it may not be straight-forward for someone who has never done it before. If there’s interest, I could create a quick tutorial to show it can be done. There can also be a forum or mailing list where people can discuss banner creation.
- Ease of using banners: The second item that is needed is an easy way to embed these in websites, ideally in a way that can be automatically updated perhaps using a snippet of JavaScript to pull data from a remote server. This could be a new website or an existing service like the Perl Community AdServer.
