Chosing the Feature Art
In order to be integrated into the Personal Life Media site and featured on the home page, your album art will need to get the "PLM Treatment." This may require we change your album art to an image that will work both in full size as well as in the tiny thumbnail images often featured in iTunes. This feature art is very important since it will determine the look of your pages in the PLM site and your album art.
If you already have visually appealing artwork that looks good at 100x100 (RSS album art size) and 300x300 (iTunes album art size), that's great! In addition, the image should be a "clean" image or photo with no text since we'll add that in when we do the album art treatment. Also, please make sure that you own the rights to image or have cleared the rights. Just send us one, "high resolution" of the clean image of at least 1024x768 pixels and we'll create the entire artwork suite.
The image will also get the font treatment standard on all PLM album art, along with the PLM opaque footer that ties it to the network visually. You are responsible for selecting the image for your album art. Final approval is confirmed with Susan Bratton, CEO. (she has great taste)
If you don't already have an image that is visually appealing and that you are totally happy with, luckily there is a free and easy way to get some really incredibly album art.
Go to Flickr, do an advanced search by keyword and make sure you select images available with a Creative Commons license agreement that can be used commercially and can be modified, adapted or built upon. Check those boxes before searching as once we choose an image, we'll need to get approval for use and provide attribution to the photographer from your bio page on the site.
The best images are simple, high-resolution and use strong, vibrant colors. You want to use a picture of something that can still be discerned even when the picture is small. Notice the butterfly, the cherry, the panther and the hand with the seedling on the home page of PLM? They are the strongest images. Try to find a single, representation object that conveys conceptually the construct of your show or at least engages the eye of the view when they are confronted with a sea of possible shows they might choose. You want them to pick your show to consider. You do that with strong, powerful, simple imagery.
Once you've found a few possible images on Flickr, email them to Susan (send the Flickr links, like this: http://flickr.com/photos/tomplunkett/36036022/) She will give you feedback on what might work and if there are any issues with your choices.
You should also look at the PLM site and see what colors are used for the header art for the show pages. We have a group of headers we use over and over including red, green, blue, two kinds of turquoise, purple, pink and others. Make sure the images you pick will work with one of the header colors already on the site.
This one image will be used to create the suite of artwork needed for the site:
100x100 Album Art (for the RSS feed)
300x300 Album Art (for iTunes)
95x95 Album Art (for PLM home page & directory pages)
Feature art for Show page
Feature art for Episode page
MP3 File Specifications
MP3 files should be uploaded into the Podcaster console with the following specifications:
sample rate: 22.05 kHz or 44.1 kz (22.05kHz recommended for spoken word programs, 44.1kHz recommended for music programs)
bit rate: 64 kbps (spoken word programs) 128kbps (music programs)
CBR (constant bit rate)
Compress and normalize to 0dB. "FM Radio" compression levels are recommended. This is critical to insure that commercials do not sound louder than the program.
How to Compress and Normalize
Helfpul Podcaster Pages
