Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

A wee redesign

I've done a little bit of tweaking to my MT templates today. Mostly adding furniture, but there's now also a category archive available for making stuff easier to locate as the archive grows (provided I don't do what most people seem to do and lose interest in a couple of weeks, which hey, we can't rule out).

One thing I have added is a little site emblem, and some people may be asking "What the hell's that thing at the top of the page?". If you're reading this via an RSS feed, they mean this thing (well, a smaller version of it, anyway).

British folk who are, let's face it, older than me may see it for what it is - the old Picasso tuning signal slide used in the sixties by the Independent Television Authority (ITA), who were responsible for providing ITV's transmission facilities until they became the IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority) in the early seventies with the introduction of independent local radio. The IBA's engineering division was privatised as NTL, er, sorry, ntl: in 1991.

The Picasso slide, while not a perfect test card due to only having a limited number of components, at least gave people something to look at as their sets warmed up before the start of the day's programming and reassured them that they were actually watching the right transmitter. Each main transmitter had its own variant in the early days of Picasso's deployment, and the version I'm using replicates this. Later, things were changed so that the slide carried the name of the ITV company whose service the transmitter carried with the caption in a narrower typeface. The slide finally disappeared with the advent of colour in 1969.

So now you know. Fascinating, eh? The only reason I'm using it is because I find the asymmetric design (hence the name) strangely appealing.

Posted by mpk at May 6, 2004 6:25 PM | TrackBack