Ideas for off-site Space Exploration community promotion ads

Question

This is not a thread for community ads that would rotate on our own main site, those banner rotations are reserved for already graduated Stack Exchange webistes. However, nobody is stopping us from posting advertising banners promoting our own site and its features on other such Stack Exchange sites that already have ad rotation on their main page in place.

Since it's probably a good idea to have some sort of a thread to serve as peer review platform with voting and comments on proposals, and to keep track of where they're posted so we can upvote them, this is the thread to post your suggestions.

What are Community Promotion Ads?

Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.

Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?

This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

• the site's twitter account
• useful tools or resources for physics research
• interesting articles or findings for the curious
• cool events or conferences
• anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.

Why do we reset the ads every year?

Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.

The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.

How does it work?

The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

1. All answers should be in the exact form of:

   [![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
   
      [1]: http://image-url
      [2]: http://clickthrough-url 
   

   Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.

2. The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

• The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
• Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
• Must be GIF or PNG
• No animated GIFs
• Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB

We can use a bit more liberal format to our posts here, since they won't rotate by the site's ad bot, but I do have a few suggestions on how we should go about adding new ads here:

• Start with a title of your contribution for easier discussion in our main chat room
• Include a preformatted text block of the complete ad's body that is to be included in other Stack Exchange sites banner rotation
• Attach the ad image meeting image requirements (see above), and use the imgurl URL of your uploaded file in the preformatted text block
• Add direct links to your community promotion ads on other Stack Exchange meta sites, so we can vote on them
• Include any comments or links to design templates you used that you deem should be included and helpful to future designs.

Remember that we might want to reuse some of your ideas and incorporate them in our own designs. This is not a competition between ourselves, so please try to design in a modular way, having access to individual elements in case other designers request them. Your contributions needn't be posted as community wikis, in fact it would be better to post them authored, so it is clearer who to contact in case of a resource request. For smaller changes to existing designs, please contact their respective authors either in the comments, or in The Pod Bay.

Please note, that we needn't advertise merely the main page of our website. Some other ideas to advertise our presence in the Stack Exchange family of websites are:

• Our Twitter account
• Our newsletter
• Our main chat room

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Try to be original, but most importantly, have fun! This is not a competition between ourselves, but our joint efforts in having to look in the rear-view mirror to even see other competing community promotion ads. By the way, humor is appreciated, but make sure it won't be considered as offensive on the sites you plan on posting your ad.

Answer 1

Voyager missions to gas giants and beyond

The idea is to mark the Voyager 1 & 2 missions to gas giants of our Solar system and their continuous operation while on their way to the interplanetary space.

The gas giants stack

The gas giant planets are stacked vertically to create the illusion of the free space, suspended in space above the Earth at night with a moonrise. The first rays of the sunrise over the Earth depict hope, and humankind's endeavours to explore space beyond our home planet. The order to the gas giants is liberally reversed for better visual effect of the mid space suspension. The whole image is overlaid with Voyager mission drawings to expose Voyagers' role in our space exploration endeavours. The SPACE.SE text at the bottom is white text over the black background of the Earth at night for added contrast. The dot between is a four-star, and the font is a customised Prometheus.

Ad hypertext:

[![Space Exploration Stack Exchange][1]][2]

  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/qIjvZ.png
  [2]: https://space.stackexchange.com/

Main image:

                                                

Posted on:

These are the Stack Exchange websites that the main banner is currently competing for rotation frequency with other advertised community promotion ads:

• Physics Stack Exchange (735 clicks in 2013, 2,813 clicks in 2014)
• Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange (307 clicks in 2013, 3,157 clicks in 2014)

Additional locations where The Gas Giants Stack will compete will be posted as the list updates. If you'll be adding any of these banners to any other location that could use our community support with upvoting, please consult with their moderators first if their site would accept our ads and then mention new locations in the comments below this post. Thanks!

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Alternative variants:

These are some of the prepared design previews that are a product of the work in progress. Feel free to use them for Space Exploration promotion at your discretion.

                               

                                                

Answer 2

Moon and Stars

^{(I'm not creative)}

[![Space Exploration Stack Exchange][1]][2]

  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/GWTVN.png
  [2]: http://space.stackexchange.com

Posted:

• Physics (417 clicks in 2013, 1,323 clicks in 2014)
• Skeptics (1,793 clicks in 2014)
• Sci-Fi (194 clicks in 2013, 1,637 clicks in 2014)