Fan Art

From TvDBwiki

Fan Art is high quality artwork that is displayed in the background of HTPC menus. Since fan art is displayed behind other content in most cases, we place more restrictions on the formatting of the image.

[edit] File Properties

All fan art files must be in JPG format. The resolution must be either 1920x1080 or 1280x720. Compression artifacts in don't appear in most JPG images if the compression is set to 70% or higher. As a result, we've set file size limits to persuade people to compress their fan art. These limits are 800k for 1920x1080 images and 600k for 1280x720. These limits will be adjusted upward if necessary. If you cannot compress your fan art to fit these limits without artifacting, please post a message on our forums with a link to the image.

[edit] Image Design

All fan art images for a specific series should be significantly different. This means no duplicates, even if they are diffrent resolutions (the higher resolution one will be kept in the event of a duplicate). Simply adding a logo or changing a color scheme to an existing image does not qualify as being significantly different. If you have and improved version of an image (better quality source, etc), post on our forums and we'll consider replacing the existing art with your copy.

Please try to avoid placing series logos and text on fan art. Many HTPC applications will already be displaying the series banner so showing the series name again is redundant. If you do add a logo, please make sure it is as high quality as the fan art image itself.

Do NOT place predefined menu areas in your image. The important content in the image should fill as much of the image as possible, with no gradients or borders added for menus. When you upload an image we will automatically create menu masked areas for applications to use. If you add these areas yourself, it will result in two gradients being applied to your image.

[edit] Examples

Good fan art: The content fills the entire image and there are no masked menu areas.

This is the result of that image with the automatic upper-left vignette applied.

Bad fan art: This image has the vignette pre-applied, which will result in a poor automatic vignette.

This is the result of that image with the automatic upper-left vignette applied. Note that due to the automatic vignette, the content is now approximately 25% of the size it should be. This would be far worse in an image with a non-black vignette, since you'd get a gradient in the middle of the image.

Bad fan art: There are two things wrong with this image. First, it has the gradient for the menu area already applied, which will result in a result similar to the one above. It also has a predefined menu area in the lower left of the image. This makes assumptions as to where the menu and content will be located for the end-user. Not all skins/systems work the same.

Bad fan art: Do not resize low resolution images to the resolutions we require. This looks awful. If you can't find high resolution source images to work with, allow a more talented artist to assemble lower quality images into a high resolution composite.