Author Topic: About furtopia.org forum's header graphic...  (Read 12848 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Benjamin

  • the admin liger
  • Species: liger
  • *
  • Male
  • Posts: 3907
    • stripeymaney
About furtopia.org forum's header graphic...
« on: January 24, 2003, 10:25:04 pm »
Firstly, when I was asked to develop this board, I knew what software I wanted to use as I was quite familiar with Ikonboard. I have been running my own boards since July of 2001, with the furry.ca forum, and later with BIG cat chit-chat. I was also on the support team for Ikonboard for several months last year, and aided in the development of the current version of the software.
 
Anyways, with my own boards that I had, I became rather skilled at making the board skin look more and more professional and adopted the current basic template for the header last fall. It incorporated the board logo and global button set into a browser-wide graphic header that will adjust to the width of any browser... with a minimum, of course.
 
For Furtopia's own board, I had decided that it would be best to try to adapt the starry theme already in use on Furtopia itself. I gave it a special twist by using a photo of stars and modifying it accordingly. I created the rough horizon line to look like grass, then used a blue gradient behind it and over the stars in order to give the effect of light from either the very first or last light of the day.
The characters set in silhouette against the stars upon this grassy ridge were taken from my own artwork and modified accordingly. It was basically a matter of messing with the contrast and darkness of each image and resizing them accordingly. I had to paintbrush in a bit of extra black on occasion, too. Oddly enough, almost all of the figures are from the adult section of my gallery, since that's where most of my best full figure artwork has been done. A couple of the images had to be umm... edited in order to maintain a PG rating, of course. '<img'>
From left to right we have Simba (lion) pointing toward the group, Benjamin (me, a liger) crouching, Nobody (border collie) gesturing toward the liger, Sporf (fox) gesturing toward the reclining tiger, and Senajit (tiger). Senajit's a non-morphic, quadrupedal tiger. The rest are bipedal anthropomorphic animals. If you'd like to check out the full images of these characters, feel free to hit my gallery at http://www.stripeymaney.com. Keep in mind that all of them except for Senajit are from the adult art gallery there.
 
The logo itself got a bit complex. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the lettering, then imported that file into Photoshop. I then embossed it and gave it a very fine glow to give it that luminescent effect that it has. The letters were filled in with a dark background and another blue gradient in order to set it apart from the starry sky in the back. The small text beneath it fairly simple and straightforward. It was simply lined up beneath the logo like an underline, and lightly embossed for effect.
 
The rest of the skin became a matter of just doing light text on a dark background, and keeping some stars in the theme here and there.
It's gotten a lot of praise from other people that develop Ikonboard forums, and a few have stated that it's the best dark skin they've ever seen. Compliments like that have made me feel proud of my work here. '<img'>
 
Hrrm. Well, that's about all that I have to say about that. Comments and questions are more than welcome, of course. '<img'>
 
Benjamin