Love the use of the exclamation point as the "i", especially where it starts to look like a person, and I'd be interested to see that taken farther.

I'm reacting negatively though to the header imagery. I looked through CC license images of Pittsburgh too, and didn't find a bunch to fall in love with. Maybe we can look for pictures of neighborhoods, and plan to rotate monthly, so that we can get closer-cropped images. My sense is that it would be really beneficial if we could include people in the images we use in the header.

I like #1...I'm not sure exactly what look you're going for, but I think this one looks most professional, but not in a stuffy, monkey suit kind of way.

Thanks for the comments so far everyone! I did this in a short, very short, period of time. The header image was literally thrown together in about 2 minutes...just wanted to give an image to look at. Geoff: Its always nice to design something and have someone else figure out what I was going for with out an explanation from me. I was trying to represent a person with it. I will work on a few more and post them. I am still not sure what sort of "feeling" we are wanting to go forth with for the blog...this certainly will influence overall design. ~ Chad Warren

I'm personally a fan of 4. I like the idea that Chad mentioned in person of "fanning" out the people/upside down exclamation points. A lot of the creative commons licensed photos on flickr appeal to me, and I suspect that even if photos aren't licensed as such we could ask the users of flickr group pittsburgh to use their photos for the site if we want.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pittsburgh&l=cc&ct=0&mt=photos - creative commons licensed photos with tag pittsburgh
http://www.flickr.com/groups/pittsburgh/

Adam: Thank you for the links to these flickr accounts. I honestly just "stole" the images in the current head from Google Images. This is something I am completely against doing, but for the sake of just making something for people to look at "offline", I created that.

I have to say, I really like #4 even though the exclamation point idea isn't in play. Also just had a kernal of an idea that PPG's top kinda works as the top of the "m" for OMG if anyone is interested in playing with that concept.

Chad, Whether they are big images rotated on page load, or smaller ones organized into a grid for header background, here are my imagery ideas for the header:
Little Italy Days in Bloomfield, Saturday morning in the Strip, Art in the park, autumn in Frick park or around Phipps, Carson St. Crawl, St Patrick's Day parade, face-painted tailgating steelers fans close-up, PNC park an hour before sunset with long shadows, the obligatory shot of downtown behind the point, Squirrel Hill on Shabbas, farmer's market on the North Side, people biking in North Park, kayakers on the Allegneny, Final Friday in Lawrenceville? (no longer going on, but good images?)... I'll try to keep dreaming, and re-update.

As for the tone, here are my thoughts.
Young, lively, but not raunchy.
Contemporary, high-touch, and smooth. We want to glamorize the city. Something between popcitymedia.com and iilwy.com?
Not aggressive or formally really heavy presence. Make it easy for user contributions to be prominent vs. overpowered by site design presence.
Lean on yellow/black/grays but favoring grays over blacks and more muted and off yellows so as not to make the site confusing with a burgh sports site.

Hopefully there's something inspiring in these thoughts, and I'll keep thinking about this question as well. Great work so far!

Two additional points of user feedback via the @omgpittsburgh twitter account:

igirlpower @omgpittsburgh me likey #5. could it be all 1 color? no go on pic. any chance of distorting lens of the wide 'burgh view? less than a minute ago from web in reply to omgpittsburgh

jenando @omgpittsburgh if you put a shadow behind the text in your blog title, it will be much more legible. about 17 hours ago from web in reply to omgpittsburgh

Logo #4, #5 and #6 all work well for me.

Love the HUGE "I" as a way to say, this is "MY" city -- my endeavor -- I work, live, play, worship in Pittsburgh. Ownership, kinds way. The "!" mark has been done before.

The rumble, rolling nature of Pgh works okay too. But, it gets harder to re-do elsewhere.

I know Chad said he threw these together pretty quickly. Any other ideas you want to explore Chad, or should we just pick one of these and move forward? (at least, for now)

I would start working on variations of #6 (or 8). People have been responding positively to the "i", and I'd like to see it used with a few different typefaces.