Designing a banner for your FLO site

Whether you are starting from scratch or working with an existing site, using a banner transforms your site and makes it instantly recognisable.

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A banner is designed to give a face to your site and make it recognisable to your students. The banner is visible on top of the site, as well as on the topic 'card' on the My FLO page.



Image specifications

The same image file is used for both the topic site banner and the topic card viewed on My FLO, with each displaying different elements of the picture. It should also be noted that these two regions can vary slightly depending on window size, device and whether the navigation menu is open.

Most landscape orientation photos will be roughly 4x3 aspect ratio (width x height). If a full image like this is uploaded, the central area is displayed as in the example below.

A yellow border shows the part that will be seen in My FLO. A blue border shows the part that will be seen in the topic.


To ensure a high quality banner, images should be optimised and cropped to 1920 x 850 pixels (px), the recommended dimensions. The example below shows the image which would be uploaded to FLO.

A breakwater is on the right of the image. The sun is setting behind the breakwater, and reflecting off the water.


On My FLO, this banner image would appear like this in topic cards:

Two topics in My FLO. The first topic has the default banner. The second topic has the picture of the sunset.


Within the topic, this banner image would appear like this:

The top of a FLO site, including the banner. It is cropped, matching the blue borders in the first image.


The FLO topic name and navigation breadcrumbs sit over the left side of the banner. Depending on the image content, it may be useful to flip the image horizontally. In this example, the image has been flipped and the darker less interesting region has the topic title overtop.

The banner has been flipped so the breakwater (and the shadow cast by the setting sun) is on the left side of the image.



What if the area of interest in the image is not central?

If the area of interest is not central in the image, it may still be a suitable image for a banner, as long as it can be cropped to 1920 x 850 px region centred around the area of interest.

Examples:

A picture of a coastline, taken from above. The bottom half of the image is greyed out, indicating that it will be removed.

The cropped version of the previous picture.

A picture of the Hub and the path heading south (to Anchor Court). The left and bottom side of the image is greyed out.

The cropped version of the previous image.


For staff who wish to prepare their own banner image, Snagit is a University-supplied program which can do everyday image editing. Snagit is available through the IDS Support Portal. Home-use licences are also available (request via Service One)

Banners for teaching sites will be uploaded by college eLearning teams. Send your image via a Service One request. You can either send them a cropped, optimised image or a candidate image that they can prepare for you.

If you wish to see how your banner looks, try uploading it to your sandpit.

Note: Images must be royalty/copyright free.

Suggested sources of free images

  1. Pexels
  2. Unsplash
  3. Pixabay

» How-to glossary