Banner Day
My friend Anthony stitched it together from shots he took with his digital camera. Makes a nice banner. Too tall though in my opinion, but still a cool picture. Maybe use it on the site for a while but look for something that's not quite as tall. 
The way the site is setup now all the elements are made to float around and resize when the browser window resizes. Thus accomodating different screen resolutions. The banner however is pretty wide and really only works at higher screen resolutions. I'll probably want to go with something like the banner on my first site. Three elements that float and resize.
The banner is too tall because the top of the screen is prime real estate since it's where the eye is most comfortably at rest. That's why programs have all their menus up there. Putting something that looks cool when you first see it but isn't the primary reason you're going to the site in the prime real estate zone is a poor design IMO. I'll probably change it later. Hard to do a good banner though.
Did the text on the banner by laying down black text and then using the
dropper to set the orange from a dominant color in the photo for
the offset text that lays on top. Kind of a drop shadow effect.
Also flipped the image left to right. Western people read things left to right so it's natural for the eye to move left to right--even when not reading (at least in the west. ) I think the horizon works best on the right cause that's where the eye ends up.
Images tell different stories when you flipped left to right.
People making woodcuts quickly learned that you had to carve the image in reverse since it will be reversed when printed. Naturally people would prefer to carve things the way they see them, but when they were printed the scene would flip. People noticed right away the difference this made in the way the image told a story.
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