The banners are indeed a cool idea. 🙂
In fact, a couple of years ago I went self employed and one of the things I was going to do was offer my services for CUSTOM DESIGNED BANNERS, lol! I was going to include pdf battle standards and flags, as well as decals (decals proved to be too cost prohibitive for me) and flags to be used as objective markers (I hadn’t considered that people might want banners to adorn their terrain with, cool idea that).
After some research, I began to feel that it was really only 40K and WHFB that had armies that used battle standards in their games, I hadn’t thought about having banners to adorn terrain. I had wanted to make examples of banners to show the level of quality I could produce, and that I could offer templates at a cheaper price for people to personalise.
But progress on that stalled when things like looking after my dad when his health worsened, commissions to produce artwork for fellow youtubers came up, and the need to work on my current custom mini commission, all meant that my initial idea had fallen by the wayside. So in the end I decided to just look for illustration work and forget the banner stuff, as I felt that it would be too much of a niche business within a niche market for me to make a decent living from. I mean, how many people would be after custom banners?…

Now I’m wondering if that’s worth pursuing again, especially as @lloyd has suggested the same idea I’ve had, and that, at least at the time of writing, 15 people out out of 186 comments on here have expressed their interest in them. But now I’d also feel like I would be stealing the idea since it’s been made public (on backstage at least), so I wouldn’t want to suddenly suggest this “brand new service idea I have where I can make you a custom banner!” as if it was a completely original idea (even if I had advertised such a thing at the end of each of my custom archaic jetbike youtube videos).
Then again, the other question that came to mind when I decided to just pursue illustration work is: with all these companies like Little Big Men Studios making decals/banners http://www.littlebigmenstudios.com, Flags of War http://www.flagsofwar.co.uk, and Battleflag http://www.battle-flag.com, if there was a market for custom designed banners, surely they would’ve offered this service by now? I had googled such a thing and found this ebayer http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bannermansplace/Custom-Wargaming-Banners-/_i.html?_fsub=2 but not found much else, so I thought the answer was yes, they would have, which is why they haven’t.

If I offered that service, it would have to be part of a much larger range of things that I could offer to do, or something I could do on the side of (possible) illustration commissions, for a bit of extra cash. More side projects have cropped up though, such as the Help for Heroes Ultramarines army raffle, and a chance to exhibit my artwork, which I’m now preparing for, so I’ve not been looking for commissions just yet, so that could be a fun thing to do once all that is completed.
Although, seeing as this is now being offered as a freebie to us in Backstage, I would feel rotten for now going ahead and making this a paid service of mine.
I think I’m just too late and missed my chance really. And perhaps after all, it is better off being a freebie that BoW can offer from time to time, since creating them, especially templates for people to modify, requires a lot of thought and work in order to set them out as something that fits particular ranges. Making sure they’re in scale, having enough options for people to use, making sure typefaces are printable, setting the images at the right quality, making sure banners that need to be folded can be done so without a loss of quality, making sure they can be cut out easily, e.t.c, e.t.c; takes a lot of time, hence why I couldn’t offer that work for free. But seeing as @lloyd gets paid, I’m sure he could go to town with it. 😛

The new Mechannicum stuff looks amazing! The walkers look like they’ve stepped out of a John Blanche painting, as I’m sure they ultimately have in the design process.
As Christian said, they’re not meant to look Imperial, they’re meant to look like Mechanicum made machines; all cybernetic and strange. As their description reads, the walkers are designed to be able to navigate the terrain of Mars (as are the prosthetic lower legs of the Skitarii).
It’s great that GW have finally got round to creating them. I heavily suspect that their creation was also in order to compliment the FW Horus Heresy Mechanicum army, since there aren’t any Skitarii minis in that range yet, but there are rules for them. I’m looking forward to seeing what they bring out next. 🙂