NOTE TO ANYONE WANTING TO JOIN THE SSMR
For the last time people, pay attention!!
If you would like to join the SSMR, don't ask. It'll just piss us all off. Here's what you should do. Go to the Amature Sig Makers and pick up the requests you feel confident doing. Read some tutorials, practice different techniques, download tons of brushes and fonts, make random and individual sigs for yourself and your friends, and keep doing that. Juggernaut will announce the trials. You won't miss them. If you're good enough, you will be accepted. If you're exceptional, you will probably be hunted down and recruited immediately. This is the only elite sigging thread currently in existence on Newgrounds. Do not make the mistake of thinking that you are good enough after having played with Photoshop for 3 days. Think of the best sig you have ever seen, and if you think your work is better, then you may be in with a chance. But in the meantime, don't bother asking. Just be a little more patient.
When the time comes, you will know.
And for those of you who have requested to see it again...
DP'S SIMPLE GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE SIG MAKING
Make your own backgrounds...
There are quite a few abstract pictures available for download from the net, but avoid doing this where possible. When using Photoshop, your most valuable tools are your brushes and filters. Muck around on a blank 800x600 canvas with black set as your background colour, and white as your foreground. Go to Filter>Render>Clouds. Go to Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic and change the cell size to 12.Then Filter>Sketch>Conte Crayon. A very simple background (not something I'd use as it is, but after a little more work, it'll be fine). Muck around with as many filters as you can. And download lots of good brush packs.
Pick high quality pictures...
You can't polish crap. As a very good friend and mentor once told me, there's no point in trying to produce a piece of art, if your pictures are awful quality. Your best bet is to look on Google's Image Search. Don't stop on the first page. Keep looking. You WILL find the perfect pic... even if it does take a while. Also, find pictures that are at least 300x200 pixels. You can always shrink a picture effectively, but enlarging a picture beyond it's original dimensions results in a great loss of quality.
Place your pictures well...
Again, nothing looks worse than having a wonderful background (that you've created yourself), with a picture slapped in the middle that doesn't work with the "feel" that the rest of the sig has. Try and get your background to "gel" with your pics. They don't have to be blended, but they should look right. If you want to blend them a little, change the blending mode of the picture to Overlay or Soft Light. Later on, I'll teach you how to get the pictures to blend with the background.
Work your text...
You will find that I very rarely leave the text of a sig as is. The first thing you need to do is start downloading as many fonts as you can. The best place for this is daFont. The more the better. Choose an appropriate size for your text. No point having the rest of your sig looking like a piece of art, if you put your name in the middle... font size 40. Big is not always good. Once you've typed your text, and placed it somewhere it looks good, go to Layer>Layer Style>Blending Options. Muck around with the Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow and Stroke options in particular. Change the settings until you get the look you're after.
Less bevel...
One of the funniest tools in Photoshop is the bevel option. Can be very effective, but most of the time it is an overkill. Avoid using it on text, hardly ever use it on pictures, never use it on backgrounds, and occasionally use it on borders. It works really well for tech borders but not much good for anything else.
Always finish it off...
Always, always, always... have a border. Easiest way to do a simple one is to create a new layer right at the top of everything, press CTRL+A, go to Edit>Stroke, choose an appropriate colour using the eyedropper on your background, change the stroke to 1 or 2px, and click ok. That's all you need. Some sigs require a thicker border, and tech ones require a border with more detail, but I'll show you those later too.
That's pretty much it. It's not the end by any means, but it will get you started. Muck around with everything mentioned above, and add me to your MSN. insigniasigs@hotmail.com. I'm not always on, but I'll answer questions when I can. Otherwise leave a message in here.