Your website masthead and skin design do make a big difference in how people perceive your site and your organization. We have several options to offer you:

Option #1: OmniMagnet designers create a masthead and skin design for you.
Let us do a simple design for you. Our design team does great work and has experience working for every major Hollywood studio. *Scroll down this page to see examples of designs we have done for clients. This is included as part of your License/Setup Fee. With this option, you will provide us with one or more images that you would like us to use in the masthead. If you have any simple instructions for your preferences with regard to the masthead and/or skin, tell us.

One important note: this is not an open-ended offer to give us a multi-page long list of preferences/requirements. Beyond just a few guidance points, you're likely getting into a custom design project. We'll let you know if you're getting into custom design territory once we see your masthead/skin work submission. We do have clients who request custom designs, but a custom design project is not included as part of your License/Setup Fee. See Option #2 below for additional details.

One other important note: our designers are good, yes, but their best work is done when clients give them good images to work with. Our designers will do their best, but the responsibility is on you--our Client--to provide them with good material to work with.

Option #2:  Have the OmniMagnet design team do a custom design for you.
This goes--or at least can go--substantially beyond just the simple masthead and skin design of Option #1 above, but you'll end up with exactly the design you're looking for . . . and of course there will be design fees for this work. After having a detailed conversation with your team, we can provide a pricing quote for your custom design.

Option #3: Have your own design team or a third-party design team do the masthead/skin design.
If you already have a design team or a third-party design firm you'd like to have do the work for you, that's fine, too. Please schedule a time for a conference call when we'll get on the phone with your designer(s) and you to hear more about what their plans are and to let them know any relevant design constraints they should be aware of. Depending on what they plan, there may still be programming fees charged from this end in order for us to be able to accommodate all of your design needs; we can provide details on that once we hear more about what you're planning.

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Assuming you are going to go with Option #1 above, which most of our clients do, we need you to deliver us 4 things:

1. In choosing the skin for your website, the most important component is the masthead. The first step then is to select photos in jpeg format (3-5 photos, and a MINIMUM of 1200 pixels wide) that you have licensed/purchased and then send to us.

2. Your organization's logos, which we prefer to get in a scalable vector file (.AI or .eps files). If you don't have a vector file, we can accept a jpeg file, but a vector file will yield better results for you. Your designer will know what we mean here.

3. Any brand "style sheet" restrictions or guidelines you may have such as corporate colors, fonts, etc.

4. Most importantly, concise bullet-list instructions of what you would like to see--for example, "we like the round corners from this site and the red from cnn.com, etc." Please make sure you (1) upload any necessary files via your site's Manage Files & Images admin screen; and (2) send a message with all the above info--including links to the files you have uploaded--via a Support Tracker message.

Please note: with items #3 and #4 (brand style sheet and design instructions/requests), the more detail and the more precise it is, the closer you come to this being a custom design that will involve additional design fees. We'll tell you if/when you're getting close to that point. Again, please understand that the standard masthead/skin design we do (Option #1 at the top of this page) is not an open-ended custom design commitment.

More details on your masthead/banner
Here's what we need from you to create a great masthead for your site:

- The three to five photos that you send should have some connection with either your group, your geography (if you're a regionally-based group), or your group's mission (if you're an interest-based affinity group.)

- We recommend you purchase these photos from a commercial service like iStockPhoto or Photodisc so that you get professional quality photos. The cost is relatively small (around $2 per photo on iStockPhoto), and these are photos that you will be using to help sell your site and your brand. It's very worth your while to spend $10 to $20 to get this right.

- How big do these images need to be? In terms of resolution, if you are sending us a single image that we will use for a panoramic masthead image--as you'll see on many of the examples below--then we need the image to be at least 1200 or so pixels wide. If you think we will be cropping part of the image and only using a portion of it horizontally, then make it even bigger. Usually the "medium" resolution size for an image from iStockPhoto will be big enough unless we will need to crop out a lot of it.

File size is a less useful measurement (compared to the resolution or pixel measurements), but in general, a file that is much less than 200KB is likely to not have the resolution we will need to give you good design results.

- Once you have the JPEG photos, email them to us as described above, or... if you have a dropbox set up with us, place them there.

- What if you have image files of your organization's logo? We can definitely work with them, but to get you the best results, we need to work with EPS or vector files. If those aren't available, we'll do our best with your JPEG files, but there can be limitations there.

Below are several examples of banners from current AlumniMagnet and AssociationMagnet clients. Click on the titles of each site to go the site itself for the mastheads you like so that you can see the masthead in the context of the site's skin--as noted above, the right design skin and masthead makes a huge difference in the impression your site creates.

London School of Economics Alumni & Friends

Penn State NYC Alumni Chapter

Boys Town Alumni

Kellogg Finance Network

Penn State Metro Washington Chapter

 Simonites

SHRM - Northwest Indiana

Erikson Institute

Great River Human Resource Assoc.

WCD Panama