Designing A Banner for WMD

When this blog first started, the header just read WMD Comedy, in black boring letters, on a white background, aligned to the left at the top of the page. So one of the first things that I wanted to do with the blog was make it look a bit more interesting and unique even at a first glance. I'm still tempted to change the whole theme, or colour of the blog page itself, but something boring in me quite likes the crisp, clean white look.

It's worth mentioning, that before I started anything, I found out the precise and exact dimensions of the header I needed to create. I've tried to design a banner for a different blog in the past, and found that if I did the work first, and the measuring second, I always ended up having to crush, squash or otherwise brutalise my hard earned artwork. As always google is your best friend, even for the most simple and basic questions. So I searched 'how to find out the size of your blogspot banner' and found this helpful blogger, who seems to have simple banner design pretty well sorted.

So, once that was done, I set to work about coming up with some ideas for it. Obviously, it has to say WMD and comedy, to get the message across immediately, and these really have to be the focus of the thing itself. But at this point I ran into a bit of a problem. The obvious choice it seemed to me, was a bomb that reads WMD, but it worries me what an awful concept WMDs really are. For us it's a harmless and fairly meaningless acronym of our names, but there's no escaping the fact that the subject itself is pretty grim. So for me, this ruled out the idea of using photoshop, as I thought this would ground the image with too much realism. A real picture of a real weapon capable of incredible devastation didn't really strike me as an obvious pairing for comedy.

So my idea was to try to make the image as far removed from the idea of really destruction as I possibly could. Which is when I thought it would be a good idea to frame it almost as if it were a comic book, even explosions are less extreme or hard hitting when we see them in comic books. Elmer Fudd or Tom and Jerry can be blown to kingdom come and the idea in your head is humour, not death and misery. So if realism was out of the question, it was up to my very meager drawing talents. Here is what was my first immediate attempt:

"Tom's work had an inescapable renaissance quality to it" - 5 stars, The Guardian

As you can see, it has practically no artistic merit, but the general outline is there. I was really keen both to make sure that the bomb looked like it was flying and that the word comedy really popped out of the explosion. I was sort of going for that effect that 60s batman has when he punches a bad guy, pow! So I googled some pop art, and some cartoon explosion and nicked some of the colours from what I wanted.

Making it look reasonably decent, took a much much longer time than I was anticipating, but there was still something relaxing about toiling away at it, making incremental progress. So now we've ended up with something that I'm reasonably happy with. In fact, as often happens to me with this sort of thing, I genuinely cannot stop staring at it. I'm a little bit ashamed to admit that I've occasionally been opening up the blog just to admire the banner again, check I still like it. One of these days, I might actually go outside, but until then, 'awesome banner skillz' are my gift as well as my curse.