Header image size?

[glymr]

Hello!  I would like to hold a contest to have people create a header image for this community: detroitbecomehuman.  However, I can't seem to find any resources to tell people what a standard header image size should be, ie "no wider than x number of pixels", "no taller than x number of pixels", or anything about whether they will degrade gracefully on mobile, etc.  Does anyone have any tips or links that might help?

Thank you very much!

Comments

[momijizukamori]

So, there's a lot of flexibility to be had, honestly, and it depends on how you want things to look when it's done! Our default set-up puts the header image as the background of the header container, and lets you pick how tall you want the container to be - the width is the width of the entire content area, unless you use CSS to modify it. On a smaller screen (including mobile), the width just shrinks to match the width of the content area. And then there's CSS you can add to modify how it behaves - whether the image repeats if it's not big enough for the whole area, or stretches to fill it, and whether it shrinks as the page gets narrower, or just gets cut off instead.

ALL THAT SAID. It's generally easier to make a big image look good smaller than to go the other way, so I'd go for a width of 2000px and probably not more than 400px tall, which will cover all the big screens out there (this is what it looks like on my 1920 x 1080 laptop screen, for example - I can give you some CSS to fix the header text positioning, heh) and then just make some tweaks to have it look better on a smaller screen. Or, you could have a different version for smaller screens, because CSS is exciting that way!

[glymr]

Wow, thank you so much for replying! (And to the others that replied as well!) My only concern with making something 2000 pixels wide is that it might be a really huge filesize in that case? I don't know if that's as much an issue as it used to be, but I don't want to slow down people's phones or cost them extra data.

I imagine the ratio is also important? I don't want to give people overly-broad parameters, then discover that the final product looks terrible because it's stretched out or strange. :/

I really appreciate y'all taking the time to discuss this with me. <3

[momijizukamori]

Ratio is somewhat important, though you you can do a lot of the tweaking with that with CSS - mostly you just don't want an image that's too tall, because it'll take up so much of the vertical screen space. FWIW, the largest of those screenshots is only 635 kB baseline, and only 287 kB after I ran some compression on it without much quality loss. But if you're concerned about mobile use, it may be worth it to have a second header that's more optimized for mobile and probably more in the 700px x 150px range