The blank space at the top of the website pages was originally intended 
to hold image banners (for a short time we ran ads, but mostly it's been 
stuff I wanted to at the time promote or raise attention to; e.g. 
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/candyfab or 
http://www.magnatune.com/info/openmusic.

However for a long time we've had nothing there (can't recall the exact 
reason but I think it was because the banner images I was using for the 
links were looking really dated, e.g. 
http://www.povray.org/i/ads/madscientist.gif).

I'd like to stop having the blank bit at the top as I think it's ugly 
(just IMO). This means either putting something there or re-designing 
the layout not to have it. The latter would be more work than it's 
probably worth, plus I think the blank can be put to good use as most 
sites nowadays have some sort of site-specific graphics or logo at the top.

Instead of having a standard smallish image there (typically these were 
under 470 pixels wide and under 70 pixels high) I could instead set a 
background image that either partially or fully fills the blank.

Width would need to be at least 2k pixels (unless its horizontally 
tileable or suited to being a single centered, left-aligned or 
right-aligned instance) and height no more than 72 pixels.

Possible candidates for this image would be a new site banner or logo 
that has the text e.g. 'Persistence of Vision Raytracer' or whatever; 
for this case, the text would need to be no wider than a reasonable 
minimum (say 800 pixels) so that it's still readable on smaller monitors 
without needing to be scaled. However the image as a whole can be 2k 
wide or thereabouts so as to fill any left-over space on wider monitors. 
  Ideally the background would be an attractive rendering or something.

Alternately it could just be some nice rendering without any text. In 
either case we can have multiple versions - one would be randomly chosen 
on each page load (or possibly per visit rather than per page).

Reason I'm posting here is that I've found it's not that easy to just 
take a 70-odd pixel high slice out of a 2k wide rendering that doesn't 
end up looking like crap, as most renderings are not intended to be seen 
that way.

So ... if anyone knows of something that might suit and/or is willing to 
have a stab at generating something that may work, I'm all ears. It 
doesn't have to be raytraced, though ideally it would be (at least for 
the background). Text can be composited on top in a graphics program (or 
I could just overlay it using HTML if we're not doing anything fancy).

Ideas?

-- Chris

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