When Learn HTML with Song launched, we wanted to bring in coders we respect, but we didn't want to ask them for a lot of their time. So I proposed a guest post that collected the answer to a single question. The head of the site chose the question, and I set out contacting respected coders to get their replies.
Because this was a catch-all kind of guest post, my goal with the graphics was to present them in a unified way. Graffiti tags are used throughout the site, as a cheeky nod to the HTML "tag". In keeping with this theme, I cut out provided photos from our guest bloggers, and placed them over backgrounds from my personal collection of Oakland graffiti photography. This created the appearance of a more professional photography studio session, rather than a collection of disparate publicity photos.
The first use of the images was for the blog, but I knew from the start we'd want to do a lot of social media promotion of this post. I used the original images to create social media cards ideal for promoting the post on Twitter and Facebook. These social cards provided a little more information, so that they were useful on their own.
The colors used for the backgrounds are based on the colors of the LearnHTMLwithSong website.
There was one more goal with these images: I needed them to take up space! We weren't sure how many replies we'd get, so we had to be prepared for any length of answers. In some cases I edited the full response from each coder to best present it as a summary. The full text of their replies was included in the final post. See it below.
