The easter egg on Barack Obama’s Web site

In honor of Obama’s win (and before you jump to conclusions, this is by no means a political post or designed to show my support for a candidate), as a designer, I’ve been to his Web site a number of times. It’s an incredibly good piece of work. His campaign will already go down in history as one of the greatest of all time, and his Web site furthered that vision.

But since I’m a designer, not a marketer or a politician, I was checking out the way his site was built a while back and found this really cool easter egg on his site.

Screenshot from Yesterday:

(Click for full-size)

Looks like a standard Web site. But a lot of Web designers use background images to make things look the way they do. It’s like taking a canvas and painting the whole thing black before you starting putting actual content on the canvas.

The Easer Egg

Well, Obama’s Web site used a fairly large background image to frame the look of his site, but there was a little love note left behind from one of the designers. Here’s a shot of the background image (click for full size):

You would have never seen that incredible eagle back there unless you went to view the background image. It’s an impressive design, and it’s hidden to almost 90% of the people that view his site. I think it’s incredible.

How to View a Background Image

For those of you who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, you can view background images yourself. If you want to see what kind of background images are lurking out there, it’s really easy to do:

1. These instructions only apply to the Firefox browser.
2. With your mouse, hover over over the area on the screen where you’d like to see the background image.
3. Right-click.
4. Select “View Background Image.”
5. And that’s it! It will show up in your browser.

There are other ways to view the images in other browsers, but this is the simplest. I can’t say I’ve seen a ton of easter eggs like this one, but if you want to check out some ways that sites are built, it’s an incredibly useful tool.