TOPIC:

When using the "standard" club banner, the thin-strip area above and below the Toastmasters blue banner bar is NOT covered by either the "background" color OR the home page background color. This leaves the banner with two glaring white strips above and below it versus the selected background colors.

Bill Malthouse
Club 6585 Manassas Community TM

Bill,

Thank you for letting us know. I have been able to replicate this in Chrome, IE11 and Firefox, with theme 1 and theme 3.

I am not seeing it... I am a bit fuzzy on what you are referring to.

Steve,

It is difficult to see on Bill's sites as his background color is just a tinge off-white. Change to another background color and you will see the white around the banner. But, like you said, the white is part of the banner in theme 1 and 3.

The mastheads seem to have gone 404 on the WHQ site, either as per your direct email link or as referenced in the writeup for "google websites" under brand masthead. In any case, ask someone at whq whether the intent was to have two white stripes or it was simply their background when they designed and published the logos and masthead. It seems inconsistent to call it out as a "Burgundy and Yellow" Masthead, but include unnecessary white stripes.

This is the link: www.toastmasters.org/Leadership-Central/...nd-District-Websites and www.toastmasters.org/~/media/B3C7B0A9EFB...BC1A7A0372A1657.ashx

If you look at each of them on the TI site, you will notice a shadow under the globe, except on the burgundy and yellow, which has the gradient

Ok, that is what I thought you meant.

The problem is the globe extends outside the colored area, so I cannot just simply crop the white strips away.

My thought was to designate white as the transparent color in the image files, which would make the background color show through.

However, I have not experimented with that yet. There may be other white in the image that we do not want to be transparent--the white in the text area inside the globe, for example. (I would have to tweak those whites to be just a slightly different color code in that case.)

It turns out that the banner images are stored as jpeg files, which do not support setting a transparency color.

I could convert them to png files which do support transparency, but the files would likely be larger, which would mean that the banner images would take longer to show up for a first time website visitor with an empty browser cache. ("First time visitor" is my performance benchmark for load speed.)

We could also try GIF files which also support transparency, but those have a more limited color palette, so the colors may not look right.

Sounds like nothing is easy ... sorry to cause you guys so much effort over a VERY TINY annoyance! I had not assumed the stupid
white bars were part of the overlay image. One other fix, paint two rectangles of the user's background color over the white stripes!
Do not loose sleep over this thing guys, there are much more important fixes and enhancements needed than this.

By the way, were are the mastheads on the site? I get 404's on any links.

Did you use the links I sent?

On the TI site, click on Leadership Central, then Logos, Images and Templates

If you look on the test website, 123456.toastmastersclubs.org, I have an example of setting a transparency color in the banner image.

This is a png file that I converted the jpeg to and then used paint.net to alter transparency.

However, it looks terrible since, as RogerM notes, there are color gradients in this image. You end up selecting little strips of color in the image (that are part of the gradient) to make transparent. It takes forever to get any progress.

BillMalthouse wrote:

By the way, were are the mastheads on the site? I get 404's on any links.

Look here: www.toastmasters.org/Leadership-Central/...nd-District-Websites

(about half way down the page)

Ok, I was able to clean it up on the test website a bit more.

If I make the white transparent it also makes it look like there is a huge gap above and below the banner image on colored backgrounds.

Whether the white is intentional or not, that is what is approved by TI as the masthead.

Gentlemen, It seems to me that you can move on to fixing other things and making REAL improvements! I had no idea I'd start such a "depth" exploration. THANKS to both of you, but perhaps enough is enough!