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~ Welcome to the Designers Lounge ~
Ok, so we appear to have a great deal of keen artists on ps.com. Mainly those interesting in creating signatures, we see many topics asking how signature makers actually create there signatures and I figured... Instead of repeating ourselves all the time, why don't we have a thread where we can point these members to? Like we do when someone asks for a signature, we point them to Signatures For All?
Basically the aim is to have a place where people can come and ask questions, perhaps critique on works and find out how to make a signature (the basics anyway).
Right, so many people ask how to make a signature so I'll do my best to explain what you need and the rest will be up to you. Hopefully you'll know where to go from reading.
GRAPHICS PROGRAMS
First of all, you're going to need a graphics program package, the most commonly used ones are Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP and Paint.net.
Quick Explanation...
Photoshop - Expensive but highly recommended.
Paint Shop Pro - Another one you need to pay for, yet cheaper than Photoshop.
GIMP - Possibly the best Free program and probably the most commonly used for beginners.
Paint.net - Free again, some people prefer it. Never used myself.
TURORIALS
Once you have chosen your desired graphics program you're going to be rather dissapointed that you are not instantly an expert in how to use it... sadly. So we're going to need to gather up some tutorials. Best places to find these are;
Youtube | Books | Web Tutorials |
Good Tutorials | All Graphic Design | Grafx Design | Graphics World <- Recommended tutorial websites
Alternatively, if you ask nicely... some members may help you.
FONTS & BRUSHES
For the love of... please make sure you get a wide variety of nice fonts and brushes, there is nothing worse than seeing 'popular' fonts and brushes appear in signature after signatures - try not to follow these trends as it makes your signatures 100% more interesting and original. Annoying part is however, although the prospect of adding a font to you signature may seem like the smallest task towards completing your sig, it's actually the most important as a bad font can really ruin a good signature. This takes time and trial and error - nobody is perfect even after that.
Your best bet for free brushes is Dafont and I doubt many people would argue.
So go equip yourself with some sexeh fonts. DO IT NOW!
Brushes are not actually necessary, it depends on what kind of sig you're producing but you can find bazillions of them just by running a simple google search, some people recommend DeviantART for brushes, but I don't condone it - artists who produce them like to keep the use of their brushes within the community - for this reason, I'm not gonna link ya to it...
Though it doesn't take a rocket scientist...
GOOD RENDERS (IMAGES)
Streached, grainy and bad quality renders are the bane of a good sig maker and making a signature using these types of images is going to get you some bad critique... seriously... avoid. I don't care if it's the only picture of cloud with a stupidly big buster sword clouting Tifa around the chops with Cait Sith... Bad render = Bad sig. Find a large image, good quality and it can be resized to fit your sig. never upscale an image to fit your signature, only downscale as upping by a large proportion will ruin the images quality. Small up's are ok, but still...
Where can you get images from? Don't you just hate it when someone points you in the direction of a certain website...
Anyway, aside from the linked obvious you could also try Planet Renders and Premium Renders
HOSTING
You need to some means of hosting your signature so you can display it, luckily for you there are some websites which offer this service for free - so you don't need your own webspace... however if you have it by all means use it. These are freebies;
TinyPic - My own personal preference. Tiny links!
Photobucket - Good because you can register and have you own gallery
Image Shack - There is a frog somewhere...
A FEW FINAL TIPS.
When making a signature it's important to consider a few points.
Colour - Do they compliment? Do you really need that vile green coloured font to make it stand out? Could you not mess with some effects instead? Do the colours used in the background compliment the render or do they help towards creating a mess which just took you an hour?
Font - Yeah it's important as mentioned before, think about the style of your signature and then what style font would work. There are safe option fonts which tend to work with every sig... it's up to you which way you decide to work with them. I'd suggest beginners stick to safe fonts, then gradually experiment. If you are ever unsure, make a selection of sigs and ask on here... we'd be happy to give you our opinion >=]
Render -Is it good quality? Is it original? If I see Master Chief again - my eyes may bleed..
Composition - Don't just slap things on the canvas and expect it to look amazing. Think about where you're placing the render, the angle of which it's place. Where the font goes. blah blah - they all help towards a great sig... More thought - better sig. Simple.
Anyway, I hope that cleared up some questions people have about Signatures and I hope I covered the main points. Any other questions... slap them in this thread and members can do their best to answer. Also feel free to show of works, signatures and people can ask how you achieved certain effects. People can also use this to showcase their own tutorials and such... It's just a thread for designers with the main question on 'How to Make Signatures' answered...
What can I say... I was bored.
This is deffinatley going to help alot of people! Well done 
Kudo's to youu xD
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