We are greatly appreciative towards those who have entered, and the entries are all good. However, none of them is quite what we are looking for, so we will extend this competition for another week in the hopes that we will get more entries or refined entries.
In regards to next week's SOTW, we will host SOTW #21 this week -- both competitions will be running simultaneously. We're doing this because it's obviously what the designers would like. Although we will host SOTW #21 this week alongside SOTW #20, we do still expect more designers to enter this competition.
We understand that it's not quite up your alleys, but part of SOTW is to try new things and test yourself, not to mention that the winner of this week, depending on the quality, will be the first person to officially have earned the GFX rank.
I will provide some feedback that I hope will help:
Universal feedback: Including custom items is, in my opinion, a strong selling point. Mary did a phenomenal job with the custom wings and dragon hastas, so it would hurt us to not advertise those. Taking a minimalist approach could be the key to making the best possible banner with such a small file size -- Ozzy's on the right track in that regard. Including images is great, but remember that we're working with a small file size, so you need to balance content, quality, and visual FX appropriately. On top of that all, don't be wasteful.
Karel (Drugs): The style is actually pretty nice; however, it has a lot of wasted space and really should be animated. I know that you don't like this theme, but perhaps you'll make another entry. If not, then at least others could benefit from the feedback.
Ozzy: Yours have the smoothest transitions of all the entries, and that's an important aspect. Verticals -- I really like your idea to mimic the home-page's buttons, and I love the "and much more..." button. The only real negative about your vertical entries is that they're a bit too plain. Horizontal -- This one has a very nice style; I like how you've kept one portion of it constant (the Emps logo) while the other side transitions to advertise key aspects. A negative to this one is that we will be limited to how much we can advertise on it because each transition takes a lot of KB.
Karil: You've included a lot in yours, and that's wonderful, and I love that you've included PvP weapon animations (D claws being my favourite); you've also, like Ozzy, used the home-page's style, and I definitely like that. However, the banner does seem a bit cluttered (which I would likely attribute to the background), and the transitions are too sudden. I recognize that the limited file size is to blame, but if you take more of a minimalist approach, you'll likely solve the problem.
