Hi Everyone,
My account has had the same look for about 2 years. I changed my banner, picture, and signature just after Hive was created. I describe this change in my post, Creating a new look for Spectrumecons on Hive. I needed to make changes to remove the Steem branding, which appeared in many places in my profile and signature. The focus of my previous look was community. The creation of Hive was a community effort. It involved the community standing up to Steemit on Steem and it involved building a new home on Hive.
Two years have passed, the community continues to grow in terms of members as well as applications. The success of the Hive Blockchain is beginning to show in terms of price and market cap. For the past several months, the price of Hive has been consistently higher than double the price and market cap of Steem.
This time round, I am making changes because I think the look of my profile and signature needs to be updated. I liked the old look but I think I can improve it. I want to connect the look of my page more closely with my content. I have attempted to do this through GIFs. I changed my background to a GIF that flashes through some of my posts thumbnails. I included a variation of the GIF as part of my signature. I updated a previous GIF that highlights some of my accomplishments on Hive. I updated my profile picture to include Mango the dog. I changed the “Future of Social Media” picture to a GIF that includes images from several of the Hive DApps.
Until now, I have used just static pictures for my profile banner. The pictures have been fine but a GIF can reveal so much more information. I have attempted to give my content a unique feel with my own style of pictures. I often include a picture at the beginning of each section of the post. My thumbnail pictures, which are the first pictures in the post (could be any picture if publishing through PeakD), are the most important and most significant pictures for each post. The GIF I created for my banner includes over 20 thumbnail pictures from various different types of posts. These posts are on topics such as:
The GIF took some time to create. I needed to select the thumbnails I wanted to use (20+). I then put them into Microsoft PowerPoint. Each slide contained part of at least two thumbnails. I then moved the thumbnails along slightly in the next slide to create the impression the thumbnails were moving.
Altogether, I used about 65 PowerPoint slides. I made screenshots of each slide. I uploaded all the screenshots to EXGIF.COM. I reduced the size of the GIF sufficiently so that it could be uploaded to Hive. When finished, I downloaded it from the website.
My banner looks a little different depending on what application is used to access my content. Below are several GIFs and pictures of my profile page that I made using several different Hive Dapps and user interfaces.
In addition to the thumbnails, I also included the previous banner and the spectrumecons, phoenix, and Hive logos. The spectrumecons logo is the number seven in three different colours of the spectrum of light (first colour red, fourth (middle) colour green, and seventh (last) colour violet). The phoenix is the new family logo. It is represents rebirth (phoenix), and relocation and travel (outline of globe in the wings).
I did very little to my picture. I used the same Game of Thrones image of myself on the Iron Throne and added a small image of Mango on my right side. Mango is mentioned in about half of my Actifit Posts and he is an important part of my content. He is on the right, because he is almost like a right-hand man (dog). I also enlarged him slightly (about X5); he is almost Dire wolf size. I normally make him bigger in pictures so he can be seen more clearly.
I have been on Hive/Steem for almost 5 years (5 years in June). Along the way, I have picked up a few accomplishment. These include:
I used the same pattern of the three logos that I used in the banner. I kept the whale. Sometimes, I like using whales. The symbolism is quite important to cryptocurrency investment. The whale moves and widens his eye slightly as a gesture suggesting he is impressed.
Blockchain could be the future for many things. Social media is likely to be one of them. Hive is the most advanced blockchain ecosystem when it comes to social media and more. Hive enables blogging, vlogging, microblogging, content sharing (videos, articles, etc), photography, art, social engagement, gaming, gambling, and even fitness. My previous signature included a picture, which I created out of PNG images of characters I created on my PS4. The picture showed community (previous theme), which is an important part of a social media ecosystem. However, I believed I could show more by changing the picture to a GIF.
When I was on Steem, I created a video focusing on DApps. I converted the video into a GIF. This GIF was part of my signature for the final year I was on Steem. The GIF I created for Hive follows along a similar path. This new GIF contains different DApps and tribes simultaneously, while focusing on PeakD in the centre, which is explaining the Hive social media experience.
I made the GIF by first making a video containing video capture of several different Hive DApps, tribes and websites. I pulled all of the videos together to create a video about 45 seconds long. I converted the video into a GIF that was small enough to be uploaded to Hive.
Below is my new signature in full. Go to my profile page to see my new banner.
If you want to read any of my other posts, you can click on the links below. These links will lead you to posts containing my collection of works. These 'Collection of Works' posts have been updated to contain links to the Hive versions of my posts.
