High School Spirit Meter Image Design

High School Network

We operate a network of high school alumni websites. We need a catchy design for what we will call the High School Spirit Meter. This will be a measure of how much high school spirit a user of the alumni site has. The more they interact on the site, the more High School Spirit they have.

We want the meter to display 5 "levels" of high school spirit, so we envision an image or tracking bar that is shaded based on the level the user reaches.

For example, new user would have 0 shading, the more interaction the user has, they go to level 1 which might have 20% of said image shaded, level 2 - 40%, level 5 - 100%.

So, taking the above into consideration, we really need 5 different images (one for each level of shading for the High School Spirit Meter).

U.S. only high school alumni (so basically anyone 18 years old or older who graduated from a U.S. high school).

The image(s) should be 250x30 pixels in size.

The image(s) should be in jpg or gif format.

The image(s) should be able to be used as a background image so text (the spirit score) can be overlayed on top of the image.

The image does NOT have to include the text of High School Spirit Meter - that name is used to explain the concept.

The image should be clean and professional - it should NOT be flashy, animated, etc.

Some random ideas we had for the spirit meter were a megaphone or any high school related image. However, someone may design a simple shaded bar as the meter but other images before/around the meter to fit the concept.

Please see the mock-up here http://www.affaction.com/spirit_mock.jpg for the area where the spirit meter will go.

We want the image to be 250 pixels wide to fit directly under the high school network logo you see. So the image in the mock-up is far too big (and we want something more professional looking).