Bright Weavings: The Worlds of Guy Gavriel Kay

'Skins' are graphic 'covers' of sorts, for the top of your browser windows. They're very light, download and install very easily, and are lots of fun - although they only work for PC users. All you have to do to install the hotbar Active-X technology that makes this feature possible, is click 'yes' when the hotbar window pops up. The rest takes care of itself! I've created a few skins that you can see on this page, all variations on GGK covers and themes. I rather like using them - and I hope you will too! To choose between skins, simply click on one of the graphics below, and it will become your default skin. And you can come back and change it for a different one any time. They look best in Internet Explorer, resolution 800 by 600, but they adapt to larger resolutions and to Netscape relatively well.

Hotbar.com is Your Personal Dynamic Toolbar. Hotbar enhances your browser with new graphics and a multitude of handy services. A skin usually takes 20-30 seconds to download to your computer, and is intended only to cosmetically enhance your browsing experience. Your computer is not at all affected, and you can continue to use it as usual.

I have taken elements of various Arbonne covers here and made a skin to echo my site logo - with art by Gerard Gauci and Cathy MacLean.

For this core Tigana quote, I've used an image from Alexander Reichstein's
beautiful cover for the Swedish edition.

It was truly hard to choose one element from Martin Springett's gorgeous covers of The
Fionavar Tapestry, but in the end I went for this detail from The Wandering Fire cover.

This is a real picture of our moon during a lunar eclipse, red because of the refraction of sunlight from the sun around the earth and through the dust in the Earth's atmosphere onto the moon.

This is a detail from Cathy MacLean's cover for the Canadian edition of Sailing to Sarantium. The quote is from the end pages of Lord of Emperors, from an inscription in Ravenna.

"The image of Avalle of the Towers, in Tigana, was directly inspired by the fact that the towers of San Gimignano were visible from the backyard of the house we rented near Certaldo."(GGK in an interview with Solaris)

This image is inspired by the refrain of 'Rachel's Song' - written by Kevin Laine for Rachel Kincaid, from The Fionavar Tapestry. The cave on the left for Kevin, the cello for Rachel, the rain for both of them.

The traditional Fionavarrian phrase used when proposing to your loved one, revived as a custom by Diarmuid dan Aillel when he proposed to Sharra of Cathal.

Inspired, obviously, by The Lions of Al-Rassan, the background is the Palace of the Nazaries in Granada, with a lion drinking from the moonlit pool in the foreground. The quote is taken from the poem Ammar composes in the epilogue, when he hears the news of Al-Rassan and the Jaddite reconquest.

Also inspired by the Lions of Al-Rassan, this sunset with the quote "Even the Sun Goes Down" calls to mind Rodrigo, who made the comment in reference to the Jaddite rule of Esperana.

Changing your computer back to its original setting:
Click the Hotbar.com toolbar button. Uncheck the "Show skin" option.

Uninstalling the Hotbar program:
Open the Control Panel and select "Add/Remove Programs" Click on Hotbar.com.

I hope that artists whose work I have used here are happy with that use; if anyone is not, please contact me and I will take down the graphic in question.

If anyone wants to design a skin themselves to submit to the site, then send me the image - it has to be saved in bitmap form (.bmp), and sized at 800 by 135 pixels. The best ones will be added to the skin centre. Or if there's a GGK quote that you'd particularly like to see on your browser, suggest it, and I'll see what I can do!