I see some "issues" here. First of all, we have two announcements for the forum, plus the two site-wide announcements (which we don't get to control) as well as several sticky threads at the top of the forum. That means that a significant portion of the top of the forum appears to be static to anybody wandering by. This isn't necessarily a problem, but any threads that have high activity will be shunted below all the sticky threads.
We might want to think about really keeping our sticky threads limited. Perhaps we could have one sticky thread that is a series of menu links pointing to other threads? Stuff that is good to read, but won't necessarily have a lot of posting traffic that would keep the thread up and active at the top of the list.
I like the idea of a catch phrase. Especially if we have a couple. These would be prime .sig material. I still need to edit my .sig, but I have so much material in there already that I haven't figured out a good way to manage all of it. I'm thinking about it though. Optimally, we would come up with a few catch phrases and could have a post with all of them, plus the bbcode to include it with a .sig and have the links work correctly. Then members could copy/paste into .sig and it would work.
I do think any banner/graphics should be small enough to be unobtrusive. At least, we could do an unobtrusive version as well as a flashy version. Then we could use them for different things.
I've never been a huge T-shirt fan so I don't feel right contributing much to that discussion. If we had a small logo, I would be much more keen on a pin that we could wear to cons and the like. But that's just me. I know other folks dig T-shirts so that's cool.
Did I catch everything? Oh, somebody asked about focused topics vs broad topics. I think focused topics are the way to go. The more focused a discussion is, the more value the thread is for archival and future reference. We moved into a forum so we could have focused threads.