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About the banners

Sharp-eyed members may have noticed some 310px square banners in the sidebar. If you want to know what they are and how they work, keep reading.

These are adverts mostly for our best brills (microsites). The second box will sometimes have guest links. They are delivered via an open source advert server with the privacy settings turned up as high as they will go. If you want to block them, nothing bad will happen. If not, nothing bad will happen. About the only thing I track is the total count of clicks. Only I (Matt) will see this data. No data is shared anywhere else.

We chose the brills based on vibes, intuition, and general appeal. Having a brill is no guarantee of getting it featured this way. I (Matt) will pick brills based on how good I think the banner will look and how likely visitors are to find them interesting.

3 Examples of brill customisation done well

If you know enough CSS you can make your brill look like almost anything. However, a good brill should still look like it is part of isBrill. Here are some example customisations that work well.

Doctor Who isBrill.com

The Doctor who brill takes on the hardest of tasks, reimagining the iconic brill sign to fit the topic. While 99% of the time, I would say this is a bad idea, this example just works.

Tea isBrill.com

The tea brill takes a more subtle approach to customisation by quietly reworking some of the colours and text sizes. What in most cases is a weak page header has become a thematically coloured strong header.

Steampunk isBrill.com

The steampunk brill makes the most of background colour to really bring out the subtle brill-roll image but replaces the Brill-i-tude with a steampunk reimagining. With just a few tactical colour changes, this brill manages to feel very different without really changing very much.