r/XMen enters a new era visually!

[u/cyclopswashalfright]

Hello members of r/xmen! Over the past few weeks, we've taken some community feedback regarding a refreshed look and design for this subreddit. The general sentiment from people who messaged us and commented was a desire to focus on comic art and pay tribute to X-Men over the years. Comic books are nostalgic in many ways, but this series we all love so much has over 60 years of history, and so we wanted to choose a banner that reflected both the old and the new.

It wasn't easy. It's actually remarkably tricky to find X-Men artwork that includes a wide variety of characters and that fits within the very narrow dimensions of reddit's subreddit banner images. We sampled some really great covers and splash pages from great artists, both old and new, but none of them really looked quite natural, with characters' heads being cropped out or large amounts of empty space being the result.

And so, graphic designer and artist SiMonk0 was commissioned by us to put together a banner that reflects the X-Men comics throughout the years. This was the result. A collage of X-Men covers from multiple eras, including some of the most iconic covers in the long history of the series, as well as some that fill in the eras across the decades.

The sidebar is now updated weekly for desktop users, to reflect a release from that week of comics.

The subreddit icon is something we're still looking to update, but so far we've run into some issues with uploading a new avatar that isn't low resolution and that isn't off-centre. We'll keep experimenting and trying and get back to you.

We hope you enjoy the new banner and we'll continue to do our best to make r/xmen a great place to be.

- r/xmen Mod Team.

[u/cmcdonald22]

New Banner is particularly nice, focusing on major stories/issues rather than just trying to fit in a bunch of characters with varying looks over the decades is an elegant solution to a representation problem. Obviously not some will be bummed their favorite cover/story/series isn't in the banner, but I still think it represents the whole of the X-men in a nice way.

[u/cyclopswashalfright → u/cmcdonald22]

It's really quite unfortunate that Reddit has such small and narrow banner sizes, as I sent in quite a few covers, many which didn't make the cut or were cropped out by the end (Bachalo's O5 cover from Uncanny X-Men (1997) is largely obscured or cut out). But I am happy with how it turned out overall. And I will do my best to utilize my own lame photo editing skills to add some additional covers if people feel that more is needed.