Each department and office site will have a banner image which identifies it. For the sites managed by people in LIS (the Library, Helpdesk, Curricular Technology, Telephone Services, etc.) the LIS Website Team decided that each site should use a banner image that identifies it as part of LIS which, when clicked, will bring the user back to the LIS landing page. Pam Fogg in College Communications prepared some examples of this graphic. These aren’t the final versions (they need a bit of touch up work), but they’re very close.
Which should we use?
#2, with #1 as second choice – nice reflection of Old Chapel! The third one looks kind of unfriendly & the 4th is the most generic.
I prefer the 2nd one. It’s the only one that is recognizable by anyone (including prospective students) that it’s a library they are looking at. I like that it shows students studying in comfy chairs and that there are book shelves in sight. Also it gets some of the mural, which whether you like it are not, shows how we mix art in with our collections. Nice job Pam. (the first one is cool too, but it doesn’t have any elements identifying with what we do/provide and although I easily recognize what part of the building it is, I’m not sure all our students would).
I also vote for #2. Brenda has already said it all for me.
Love them all. #2 is best, imho, with #1 a close second.
Ditto. #2 then #1. #4 makes me feel like I’m a pigeon looking for a target.
I like them all too. I vote for #2.
(I’m copying this from under the image of number 4 so all the comments are in one spot…)
I vote for this one (number 4). The others all focus on the Library’s architecture (in my opinion) – the bottom one is the only one with people in it. At least the only one with obvious people in it. (I just noticed the second one appears to be a view in on people sitting in one of the Reading Rooms, but that’s hard to tell without close inspection.)
Pam has produced cleaned up versions of each of these images. I’ve put them the the File Uploads area for the LIS home page where they can be referenced for use in other sites. The path to that area is http://midd2.middlebury.edu/offices/technology/lis/files
I’ve also applied #2 (which currently has the most support) to this site so people can see how it looks in the actual site.
I prefer #2
I will buck the trend and say #3.
In order of preference –
3 – for the simplicity of design and the hint of sky/soaring
1 – for the reflection of Old Chapel and the world outside – suggests a broader view outside the confines of research and academia
2 – for inviting us in
4 – not as inviting or representative
Are there any images looking out from the East Reading Room with the Green Mountains framed in the windows? I was up there the other day as the sun was setting (a beautiful rosy sky lighting the room) and I wondered if maybe a view from the inside looking out could better reflect our mission of bringing knowledge and engaging with the world? And also suggest a shared view from our other LIS spaces? And also share a little bit of our VT location? Just a thought.
Seeing that the real-size image 2 has discernible human beings in it, and not being able to get Terry’s pigeon image out of my mind, I’m switching my vote to number 2.
With a follow-up question – will it be possible to easily change it in the future? Are we making a more or less permanent decision here?
These are really easy to switch out later, so our decision is in no way permanent, just our feeling at the moment. However, Pam has to prepare over 200 of these images (one for every academic department, program, and administrative office). She was nice enough to give us four to start with and I think we should confine our selection to the four we’ve been given, at least for the initial launch of the site, so that she has time to make the graphics for other sites.
Now, to throw another curveball out there: we don’t necessarily have to use just one of these. Using just one does provide a consistent look-and-feel between all of the LIS sites, but we might decide that using a different image for a different function of LIS is appealing. For instance, we could use #1 for the main LIS site, #2 for the Library, #3 for the Helpdesk, and #4 for Curricular Technology, or some other combination. We wouldn’t want to get too granular with this and have different images for the printer documentation, but it might be appealing at the level of those large sub-sites.
Simply from my personal taste in design, I like #3 followed by #1.
Anyone not familiar with the campus or library won’t necessarily know what these are…
Echoing most of the comments above, #2 may do the best in representing that we serve people (and collect books, and, gee, chances are some of the people in the chairs even have a laptop open!) — this might be best for, say, the “interior” Library site.
These banner options are great, I really like them all. I’m leaning towards #2, but will be interested to see what everything looks like once all of the page elements are brought together. We may decide at that point that we need the banner to be less “busy,” and in that case #3 would work well.
I strongly prefer #2 with #3 as distant 2nd
After some discussion in today’s LIS Website Team meeting, we decided that we wanted to use different images for each of the major areas of the LIS site and assigned the banner images to the sites as follows:
#1: Helpdesk, Administrative Systems (i.e. Banner, Hyperion) documentation, and Telephone Services
#2: Library
#3: LIS Home Page
#4: Curricular Technology