The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.
As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it’s awesome and I think it’d be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I’m sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.
You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.
I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.
Lemmy.world looks like this
This discussion will run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.
I like #2 myself, he looks happier, and cuter. #1 looks a little sad.
#1 is doing all the actual work. #2 is his manager.