The well is a conferencing system based in the San Francisco bay area, with many different areas of discussion. People who use the system's web-based interface see a graphical banner for each conference. The generic ones are just a .gif of text.

Every now and then I get an idea for a fancier one. I used a variety of programs to do these: Windows Paint, Paint Shop Pro, AutoCAD, Sketchup. They are various sizes because that doesn't matter, as long as it's similar to one of the the default sizes - nobody ever sees two of them at once, except as presented here. More important is keeping the file size down, and for something that's just 80x400 or so, it's easy to remove the bloat and keep it looking good.