Official Top Gear Calendar Wallpapers

[Webmonkey]

Here is the August calendar. Hope you like this one, it's a totally different look for our calendar.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/downloa..._1280x1024.jpg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/downloa...6_1024x768.jpg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/downloa...06_800x600.jpg

Feedback welcome.

[Overheat]

It's a nice attempt at being different, though if you're gonna go for a pop art look, I think you need to research into it a bit more. To be honest, it's a little poor. I don't know if you've seen the "Alternative Top Gear Wallpapers" on this site yet, but they're far superior in design, layout and presentation than the official ones. You should check them out, there's a lot to learn from them, and surely the fact that such a thing as an alternative exists, suggests that you're going wrong somewhere.

[Webmonkey]

While that's all well and good, I don't have the available time of a fanboy!

No one is ever going to love every wallpaper, and I really don't have the time, or the money to make an award winning work of art each month.

As for the alternative wallpapers, I'm thrilled they happen, and I understand the need for them (as I've said before we can't make wallpapers for EVERY resolution out there). I don't actually agree with you that it means we are doing something wrong. I think it's pretty usual for people to make unnofficial stuff for programmes. This whole site for example could be argued is a direct result of the failure of our site to give the viewers what they want (message board, show download, wallpapers, fucking petty arguments )

I may not be Lichtenstein, but at least I tried something new

[Overheat]

I understand that you may well be short on time in your day, though I didn't realise that it was you yourself that was making these backgrounds. It seems a little absurd for a webmaster to be doing the job of a graphic designer, if the BBC want the job doing right, then they should get a graphic designer to do it and then it doesn't have to use up your time and money.

The resolution is less of an issue than the design. Presumably the desktop calendars are used as a way in which to enable you to get people to frequent your site more often as well as a reward for people that already use your site a lot. If so, having 1280z1024 as your maximum makes sense as the majority of visitors to your site will not be very likely to have a higher screen resolution than this.

Basically, I personally think that it's simply a design and layout flaw that is the reason for the alternative background's existence. I also think that the example you gave of why this site exists is actually quite true, although you seemed to have posted it as more of a mockery. This site does exist to fill the gaps that your own site does not / can not tread. In my opinion, to make a successful background, you need it to look stunning and to achieve this I think you need the picture to take up the whole of the background.

If you are struggling to find time and money to do this, just send the picture(s) that you intend to use for next month to this site and I'm sure there will be people willing to do the work for you.

I think you'll agree that I've only offered constructive criticism here and you shouldn't be getting so worked up about it - if you leave a "feedback welcome" statement in your message, then expect to get feedback - some feedback you'll appreciate, other feedback, you might not. Sorry if I've offended you at any point, it was not my intended purpose.

[Webmonkey]

I do appreciate the feedback, and don't get me wrong, I'm not having a go, I'm just telling you how it is.

I agree. The BBC is insane, we should have designers working on design things, but they've made them all redundant, and our budget doesn't stretch to getting someone to do this each month. My coments about this site were genuine too, I really think what I said is true. If there is a site like this, then it means the official site lacks features the viewer wants. I'm not being sarcastic here, I know better than anyone the shortcomings of BBC programme websites.

I tell you what though, before we launch our new site, I'll conduct a sensible survey into popular desktop resolutions, and I'll get a wallpaper made that allows for LCD 16x9 resolutions. And that takes into account other things.