serious help required

[gwlubin]

folks, i have a question - and it's a serious one.

take a look at www.loobie.com (http://www.loobie.com) it's coming along rather well, but i am looking for a way to graphically represent the search engines, without using their logos individually.

in other words i wanted to construct a graphic with ALL of the logos on but in miniature.

these are the questions:

a) what size should each miniature be?
b) since they have different aspect ratios, what is the best way of laying them out so that they don't look too untidy?
c) what is the best way of getting all of this into a fast loading graphic?
d) is this a good idea anyway

please be brutally honest in any critism. the critism round here can ce a bit too gentle. i have very thick skin and can take it.

/g


-------------------------------------------------------
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may
think aloud.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
-------------------------------------------------------

[cyberassassin]

Nice site....

Here is what I would do. Capture the logos from the wesites, or whatever. Probably GIF's but that doesn't matter. Find one to mess with (probably the smallest, or the one that you suspect to be the most difficult to read) to get it about the size you like. Pick one as your base size. Write down that dimension. Pick a control dimension, say width. Change all of your logos by constraining proprotions and matching your control dimension. This is a lot of work, but it works. Create a blank image (I assume you have photoshop or something comprable, like Graphic conveter) slightly larger than what you want. I would go width x (number of engines)height. You can then lay out the individual icons on this blank image, creating a navbar. Lots of work resizing the individual icons, but I find that gives the best results. Crop the resulting image to your liking, and make it a GIF or JPG. Then create a image map for the links. I think you could get the logos pretty small, say 20 x 20 pixels and then the reulting image would be 20 x (?). If you want more info, mail me, I am getting sick of typing in this netscape window. bfrank@mtmarchitects.com

BTW, I had to do this similiar operation for a website with differnt size images, but I wanted them to fit in table nicely. Kinda shoddy, real quick, since i now work on a computer all day and don't feel like spending a whole lot of time on one after work, but the premise is there. www.krunk.org/bfrank/opengdl

You can also look at some of the portfolio pages I have composed on my coprorate site. Look at the residential portfolio. www.mtmarchitects.com