Introduction
These guidelines provide the instructions to create a logo for a Looking Local microsite. Once created the logo should be e-mailed to the Technical Manager to be loaded into the Starter Kit CMS and made available in your microsite. If you have any issues, concerns or questions regarding this process please contact the Technical Manager.
Alternatively, we can prepare the logo image for you. We require a high quality image of your logo, whose proportions are roughly in line with our 272 x 96 pixel image ratio requirements. Logos requiring preparation should be e-mailed to the Technical Manager.
Interactive TV Colour Requirements
Application authors are advised to use PAL safe colours exclusively in their interactive TV applications.
(You could also use the NTSC filter in Photoshop 7 and above)
Colours whose R,G or B values are in the range 0-16 or 236-256 should not be used. Application developers should set the saturation levels of their images to range between 16 and 236 for the R,G and B channels using the Levels interface in Photoshop.
Some colours with in these ranges will still flicker on the TV screen.
Application authors are advised not to use the following colour combinations, as they can cause screen flicker and "barber pole" effects:
- Black and White
- Red and Blue
- Yellow and Purple
- Red and Green
- Blue and Yellow
- Green and Blue
JPEG Image creation - Sky Active Platform
Please find below instructions to create the logo and images for your local authority DiTV microsite. Note we are specifying to the Sky standard which is the worst case scenario, and as such allows cross-platform compatibility.
The Sky platform currently cannot render any JPEGs with a version number higher than 1.1. This information is held the header of the image; invisible to the eye the header allows applications to identify what type of image it is.
The problems have been occurring when newer versions of the JPEG format (ie. Version 1.2) have been resaved in as a lower version (1.1). Some of the original header information remains in the image. There are also some issues with image creation and compression settings, which must be implemented correctly.
To avoid this in the future there are several steps we can take:
- Ensure colours used are 'websafe' or if possible NTSC safe.
- Ensure logo appears on the correct background size (ie the standard template).
- All JPEGs dimensions must be divisible by 16 pixels and sit on a 16 pixel grid.
- JPEGs must be saved out in a Non-progressive Format
- JPEGs must be saved in version 1.1 (see checking version below)
Logos: Creating your JPEG
The following are some simple steps, which will enable you to create effective JPEGs for logos for the the Sky Active Platform.
- Complete area for logo 272 wide x 96 height (pixels)
- Leave a 10 pixel minimum gutter from the edge of the area to the logo to allow logo to breathe.
- If colours are highly vivid and saturated, reduce the overall saturation of the image. E.g pure black or white in an image would require slight de-saturating.
- Keep file size to 10K max, to allow for quicker loading. The greater the compression the better, though high degration of the image quality should be avoided.
- Get original logo artwork, this artwork should only have been saved once after creation. This artwork could be in the following formats: .ai (Adobe Illustrator), .psd (Adobe Photoshop), .tiff, .eps, .png (Macromedia Fireworks). If the format you have isn't listed here don't worry, just ensure it hasn't been saved several times before you use it.
- Place artwork on to the 'Background' Template ensuring the background white has the following RGB value: 235:235:235.
- Save artwork as a .bmp. If you have created the logo in Adobe Photoshop ensure that all the layers have been flattened before you save as this will reduce file size.
- Use Microsoft Paint (Start/All programs/Accessories) to save your logo file as a JPEG.
- JPEG created.
- Your image can be checked for Sky compatibility using the Looking Local jpeg checker.
