Here is my first sig, please don't be nice and say what's wrong so i can work on it. UPDATE: edited the metroid render.
the background is a bit plain, the metroid render could have been cut out a lot better, and the name text is very difficult to read. Plus the whole thing looks too busy.
i would have to say the same and that the white bit needs to be transparent and a border would be good to have
in the original pic the white is transperant but i think it changed when saved cutting out renders is on of my biggest problems, i'm a linux user (ubuntu) and i only use gimp, and i haven't found any tutorial yet about cutting renders.
3/10 is the rating I would give The renders weren't cut out very well and the background is terrible, also think about where you place stuff, borders and text placement, another thing is: Less can be more
This is probably going to hurt.... Firstly if you are new at making sigs then you shouldn't be cutting renders yourself, find a renders site (planetrenders is good) and download your renders from there untill you have had enough practice and followed enough tutorials. Im an ubuntu user too, although I dont use GIMP (it confuses the shit outta me) im sure there is some sort of 'pen tool' for vector cutting renders. Perhaps a few tutorials will point you in the right direction. On to the sig... firstly the white piece that is susposed to be transparent should be transparent, save as .PNG next time. second, you have 4 different renders, none of which are related in anyway, furthermore the 3 renders on the left are dull and blurred, the focal point (if you could call it that) is actually the mario render, you dont even see the other three. Your eye is drawn strait to the mario render which is badly cut, blurred, has some sort of weird stroke (unless thats just super bad cutting) and is completely out of place. third, the text is horrid, bad font, bad placement and pretty much unreadable. It has no contrast to the background and is also probably too big. forth, the sig on a whole looks much too busy, the background however looks way too plain. Solid blue fill? even chuck norris could do a solid blue fill in MS paint. Try something a little more complicated and appealing. Even a gradient would have been better than a solid fill.
White doesn't equal transparent. The alpha value of the pixel defines the transparency. Making it white would make it perceivably transparent only on a white background. See the example of text on a blue background in this Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(graphic) Note: In editing programs, transparency is denoted by gray checkers.
I thought the transparency issue was because he had saved the images as jpeg which dont support true transparency, however having checked the image type I can see he saved as .png. As B2K just said, white doesn't equal transparent.
in gimp it was transparent, really, but i think i have forgotten to set the transparent on i've maked some other pics, i have looked at your commentary and have tried to make some new. you can see them in my portofolio
