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You may have noticed the new banner at the top of the page. Dispatches reader Matthew Pickard had some time on his hands and he made it and sent it to me. The image is of a statue of Giordano Bruno, a scientist who was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church in 1600 for heresy. It’s a perfect image for this blog. I still love the old banner that Jeff Hebert made too, and at some point we will be installing the ability to have rotating banners. But for now, I wanna give this new one some time up top.
The New Banner
January 19, 2012 at 2:03 pm 
Ed Brayton 
Posted in Uncategorized 20 Responses to “The New Banner”
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I’ve been wondering why Emperor Palpatine is on your banner.
From a branding perspective, the two banners are quite different. The old banner provided a sense that this is a community of intelligent dialogue, whereas this one feels much darker in mood. Don’t get me wrong, I like the new banner, but I think they set very different tones.
Ironically, those two tones may match up well in today’s zeitgeist where intelligent discussion has been relegated to the darker corners of society, shunned from the mainstream.
I thought it was Bill Belichick.
“And you, young Brayton… We will watch your blog with great interest.”
I love both banners. I initially thought it was a priest from some Daedric shrine, but then I took an arrow…
I’m just old and/or nerdy enough that my first thought was of the servants of Landru in ST:TOS Return of the Archons. Are you of the body?
I don’t care for it. Now that I know who it is and why he was chosen it makes sense. I like the concept. But it’s a bit like a joke that needs explaining, the impact is lost in the gap between exposure and understanding.
It’s good artwork. Having said that it is dark, I almost expect him to be holding a scythe.
I didn’t know what the image was either and had to ask Matthew. My first thought was the same as Area Man, I thought it was Emperor Palpatine! But I like the look of it, and once I knew what the image was I thought it was even cooler.
The new one looks like a ticket for something — both the layout and the typefaces.
#10:
It’s like those freebie tickets to see a local band that are always at used CD stores, fanned out on a table.
Very nice! If you ever do go to rotating ones (and no my feelings won’t be hurt if you don’t!), I hope you use the revised one I sent you a few months back that’s properly sized for the new layout. You were using the old one that was output at a different resolution and it bugged me every time I came here to see it all stretched out and weird. I can’t help it, I was born this way.
I thought it was one of the monks out of “The Holy Grail”, still waiting for him to hit himself in the head with a plank of wood.
I don’t know if this is related or not, but I can no longer get the nice formatting of this site on my smartphone. It always worked fine until just recently, and seems to have coincided with the change of the banner. I don’t really know if it’s related or not. Is anyone else having this problem?
Yay! I guessed Giordanao Bruno right. I like it.
The Emperor Palpatine. And his fate*.
Dingo
—–
* How’s that for a pair of references to another obscure Italian killed by the Catholic Church.
bananacat:
WordPress Mobile Pack for Ed’s blog works just fine on my phone. You can switch to the desktop site at the bottom of the page, which will retrieve and load all the banners and ads. That works fine for me as well (iOS 5).
It only took me a few seconds to come up with Bruno.
Sad to say, I recognized the statue as well. Why yes I’m a geek, and proud of it.
Think of him whenever you see something named after Saint Robert Bellarmine, who served on the Inquisition panel which condemned him to the flames.
I love it (and much prefer it to the old one). But this probably has to do with my being a huge Star Wars fan.