v1.0 Sup, after about a thousand requests I've decided to make a lengthy tutorial on tag's and pretty much design in general. If my writing style is confusing, I apologise, feel free to correct me in places needed I'll try to make an instalment at least once a week, I have a few more written out that need to be tweaked etc. But I'm still taking requests. I'll include some case by case comparisons if they're relevant to the tutorial, i.e. if I was talking about flow and I find a particularly nice flowing tag on ForgeHub. I'll pick it apart and explain things from my point of view, etc. This works in both way, too, I'll also pick apart things like sigs that don't flow well and why. That sort of thing. A few things that I won't be doing in here however; (most likely to the dismay of a few people) • I generally won't be teaching you certain effects in Photoshop, so please, for the love of God, don't ask me, "how'd you get x effect on y sig?." Thing is, I'm usually not 100% sure. Things happen, I don't keep track of what I'm doing and you should be able to find your own way in Photoshop. Which brings me to my next point. • I won't be teaching you Photoshop, so throughout the instalments I may be brief with my Photoshop insight, this is because I'm assuming you generally know what you're doing, this isn't meant to be a 'learn2photoshop' sort of thing. Sorry, but I just don't have the patience. • What sigs/tags cases I choose to analyse in the tutorial is of my discretion, this isn't a CnC thread, don't ask me to feature your sig/tag.Right. We got all that **** out of the way? Let's begin. First thing's first, tags/sigs are nothing but pure design. Design, when watered down is a series of tried and tested conventions that help push your message across effectively. Design conventions are important to keep in mind when you're doing any sort of design, be it a poster or website or even a sig. They're great guidelines which everyone should abide by, at least at first, as you become more and more confident in your skill, feel free to play on the conventions, just remember what looks good and what doesn't and what constitutes experimenting with conventions and being an outright pretentious knob head. So let's get some interactivity up in here. I'm going to set you a couple tasks and I want you to just put them in a reply on here and I'll try to give you some critique or just put in my five cents. Ok? Ok. One thing to remember in design first and foremost; to make a good balance of negative and positive space. In it's most simplified form, positive space is the subject, negative space is everything else. Usually, you want your positive space to be clearly defined from the negative space, how you do this is where the designer comes in. The trick is to make it so that while the positive space is there, the negative space is its own entity as well, it is important in design. Take this for example; (I love Jeff Pidgeon, btw. Great animator, he works for Pixar ) Now, while seemingly simple upon first glance, this elephant and his partner have a lot going for them design-wise right now that make it so elegant and effective, but lets have a look at the negative space versus the positive space. Even though it's just a simple cartoon, exaggerated and all, just by looking at the positive space silhouette that its an elephant with a bird on it. The negative space acts exactly as it should, complimentary to the positive space, it's harmonious. Placement is also a big part of it, yeah, I know, it's right in the middle, but it works well, doesn't it? But not all shapes look best if they're dead centre of everything. In sigs/tags your designs should at least follow this basic convention, if you take care in this aspect, everything else is really, just icing on the cake. Good composition stems from good neg/pos space balances, it's up to you to find it and use it. Here's what I'm going to get you to do. Open a new canvas, about 500x500 pixels big, make sure its a square, fill it with either black or white and choose 2 letters, ascii symbols, numbers, grammatical symbols and make them either black or white and arrange them to make good use of both positive and negative space. Oh and yes, I know this may seem really really retardedly beginnner for some, but bare with me, we'll progress quickly. I have like a mini-cirriculum set out here If you have any issues, feel free to PM me, next part of this tut will come later on, should be within the next day or two, promise. So, what are you waiting for? Get goin'! Quick 20seconds and here's what I came up with, feel free to judge it. By the way, that's + and } flipped in arial black, size 300pt.