Red Bull Haiku Headline Contest

Regular visitors to the Red Bull Rising blog will note a couple of design changes, made partly in response to letters recently received by the Anti-Fine-Print Action Squad of the National Guard's Crackpot Bifocal Brigade, of which I am apparently soon to be a card-carrying member.

Featuring white type on gray background, the blog's previous design was a little hard to read. While we (the editorial "we") experimented with some new cool tools and photographic templates now offered by Google's Blogger--the free service on which Red Bull Rising is hosted--we ended up taking a few retro directions:

We made it bigger. The main column is now wider. The typeface is now larger. We're experimenting with Trebuchet, a sans-serif font. All this is intended to make the blog more accessible and legible. Let us know what you think!

We made some static pages. This was the new Blogger template feature we most desired. It allowed us to move the pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo such as "contacts" and "copyrights" into a tool bar. In the future, this will also allow us to establish more formal connections to other projects and publications. Watch this space for details!

We put it in black-and-white. Our professors in journalism school taught that the most easily read color contrast is black on light yellow. With the new design, we went with black-on-pure-white. In the vote on legibility--between the "new" combo and the "old" white-on-gray--we're pretty sure the ayes ("eyes?") will have it.

Yes, the banner is now officially big enough to seem 3D. "Objects in blog may be closer than they appear." This opens up the possibility, however, of adding a "tag-line" to better define and describe the purpose of Red Bull Rising. That's where you come in:

In two lines, approximately 30 characters each (including spaces), describe as much as possible the purpose of Red Bull Rising. Bonus points for evoking concepts such as "family," "34th Infantry Division," "Afghanistan," "WWII history," etc.

If you need to review the blog's mission statement for more ideas, click here.

Here are three examples, just to get the juices flowing:

• "On the tail of the 34th Infantry" / "at home and abroad"

• "Home fronts and battle lines" / "Africa * Italy * Iraq * Afghanistan"

• "From the Heartland of America" / "to the Global War on Terror"

It's not haiku, but it's close! Make your suggestions in the comments section below, or on our Facebook page! And thanks for reading Red Bull Rising!