The Logo

[LD]

In thinking about the visibility of the site, I wondered what a visitor unfamiliar with the site may see when they encounter it.

The top left Logo has a minor flaw.

It states "The CBG" : Creating Campaigns. But a newcomer may wonder- "what is the CBG"? The text "creating campaigns" is helpful, but many may wonder: "what is a campaign"

Solutions?
Should the logo also state "Campaign Builder's Guild"? Nowhere is it clear at a glance to a newcomer what the site's actual name is until they click on the forums and *may* see the tiny text that states so.
Note: The wiki page states the full name of the site.

And maybe our tagline should be different; what about "Creating Worlds"... since that is more what we do these days rather than just confine ourselves to creating campaigns for roleplaying games?

Just some thoughts.

[O Senhor Leetz]

If the CBG gets a new logo, I think it goes without saying that it needs to be a turtle.

[Polycarp]

I think this site should really mention the word "worldbuilding" somewhere.  That seems to be the most common word for what goes on in the Homebrew forum of this site, and is used heavily elsewhere in the internet (e.g. /tg/ threads, r/worldbuilding on reddit, and so on).  While this site is not exclusively (or even primarily) a worldbuilding site - we've done campaigns, forum games, adventures, and RPG rule/crunch discussion - it is kind of one of our major things, and it seems sensible to have the commonly used word for that major thing somewhere prominent.

[LD]

Good point Polycarp- And to add, adding Worldbuilding to meta-tags for the site will probably lead to more incoming hits from people doing searches. Worldbuilding is sort of an established search community.

[Tensen01]

Considering the name is "Campaign Builder's Guild" you want the subtitle to use different words. "Creating Campaigns" is a bit redundant since it says that right in the name. "Building Worlds" is a good subtitle, but would be even better not using the word 'Build(ing)". "Creating Worlds" would probably be best.

[Ghostman]

I would prefer a brief list, showing that we cover a variety of activities. Perhaps something like this:

The Campaign Builder's Guild
Worldbuilding * RPG Design * Campaigns

[Rose-of-Vellum]

I like it. :D

[LD]

Good ideas regarding general copy-writing practices, Tensen-if the name of the site is spelled out (rather than the abbreviation CBG as it is currently), then that is good suggestion.

Ghostman- I think your implementation is the best way forward (as far as my vote matters).

Question for Nomadic and Sparkletwist:
- If one of us (I could possibly do it...though the graphical skills of others may be better) were to design a replacement along the lines of what Ghostman states, would you place it up?
- To aid in creation of the logo, could we please have the dimensions needed for the image?
- Are the key words that Ghostman suggests present in the meta tags for Search Engine Optimization purposes?

[Xeviat]

For what my 2 cents are worth, I support changing the logo to the full words "The Campaign Builder's Guild", and putting "worldbuilding" prominently. I like Ghostman's suggestion a lot.

[LD]

I have a draft here.

It clearly needs work and there are also two hangups/limitations.

First:

Apparently the top banner is comprised of at least 3 images. one for the globe, one for Creating Campaigns, and one for the rest of the blue bar. This makes it a bit difficult to estimate the true space I have to work with when designing it and it seems to mean that any design needs to have 2 or 3 separate images that will need to be properly incorporated. I would like this to be easier and to fold the globe and the "creating campaigns" whitespace image into one image, which hopefully will fit the space.

Second:

The below image uses the CBG globe as a placeholder- If we have the original file we could Brownscale it to be like a tattered map fragment, or we could keep the globe as it is without "The CBG" written across it.

Below, I grayscaled it and put classic "globe"-style latitude longitude lines.

The background is brown as in a map fragment or as in old parchment paper. Its bottom is blue like rolling waves, which melts into the pre-existing blue so we do not need to change that banner color.

I also added IRC games to the banner because I think the IRC games are something special that you will not find in places other than this site.

Request:
-Maybe someone can draw a nice cartographic brownscale globe to put over the placeholder one?

Notes: I intend to replace the asterisks with bullet points or something more visually appealing. The centering, movement/issue has to wait on resolution of issue one above. The font, Bookman Old Style Bold, was chosen after some experimentation though and I think it is a fairly good choice.

Also as a FYI: The image upload attachment function seems to be maxed out on this site. I received an error that the upload folder is full when I attempted to upload a 52 kb image, so I uploaded the image to http://postimage.org/.

[sparkletwist]

I'm really not sure what you're trying to do, but in all honesty I can't say that I like it very much.

[LD]

The point is the content and I explain myself fully in the post.