The Banner Art

I hope you like my new banner. It was commissioned from a real artist,....

.....Carel Pieter Brest Van Kempen. You may want to visit his website to check his artwork (and perhaps buy some, or comission your own banner). You can see some of his art also on this webpage.

He has also recently published a gorgeous book, which you can buy either here or here.

Finally, you are surely going to enjoy his beautiful blog. I hope he gets invited to be in the next wave of new SEED sciencebloggers.

I tried to upload the uncropped, unreduced, unmodified version of the banner art so you can play the game "spot and identify the most species" but it went all over the right margin and got partially covered by the Krakatoa ad. So, you can click on this to check it out. Or, let me try to post it like this and you click on the image to enlarge:

More like this

First post! Whee! Always wanted to do that since my Slashdot days.

Congratulations on the big move coturnix and I love the new banner. It's really beautiful.

Glad to see you finally at scienceblogs! Darn... now I have to change my bookmarks and link from my own blog! Glad to do it though.

Bora, a quick observation after looking at your banner for a few days and comparing it with the original posted here: whatever compression scheme you used to fit it in the 756 x 93 px window really took out a lot of the detail and color of Carel's beautiful artwork. Have you asked him for help on re-sizing it? I downloaded the original, opened it in Photoshop and it at least appears to have the correct dimensions. Given that it meets this standard, I have no idea why it would overlap on the right sidebar and the Krakatoa advert.

Since we all had some troubles when moving, have you tried reloading the original file in your templates since the new homepage launch? I don't know a great deal about jpg compression, but it's a shame that such lovely detail was lost when uploading to the SB template.

I am limited by software I have. If you or someone wants to play with it, I'll send you the original file (or even better - the enormous PDF version of it - the really big one) and you can try to resize it using more appropriate tools.

I wish I could help, but I'm afraid I'm at least as limited software- and computer-skill-wise as Bora. I had to turn to Kinko's to scan the original.