Hey Jazzman!

strawberries

Just wanted to say a massive thank you for the excellent jazzman theme; plus all your great extensions. I love the way my site works now. http://www.love2escape.com/chat/ Thank you and best wishes from Ireland.

Thomas Heath

Freaky. You're using Mark's icon! http://www.love2escape.com/chat/account/3/

lech

Bwahaha!

strawberries

You can't beat open source! LOL (ps - i love the little icons used in here, and didn't have any luck finding others via google)

strawberries

PS - I did like your avatar as well, Lech! So watch out! :)

lech

well, You do realize that marks avatar looks a lot like him, and mine looks like me, right?

strawberries

LOL well, I took out the lettering that was on the front of Mark's head (hair) :) And your avatar inspired me to downlaod a picture of Lenin and try and photoshop it into an avatar................but when you work with something so small as 32 pixels by 32 pixels, it is pretty difficult. PS - where did you find these great avs, lech?

lech

32x32 bitmap spaces are not difficult to work with for something so simple under 8 colors. I simply made mine, took a photo reference of myself and did the standard pixel push until it looked right. As you can see now I have several Like 3stripe has. It's probably best to make one of yourself or have someone do it for you instead of using other peoples icons (thus why mark obviously had his name in his browline).

strawberries

when you say you did a pixel push - what exactly is that, lech? i have a pic of myself here somewhere and I would like to do something similar.

lech

It's a figure of speech meaning I simply pushed the pixels around to a point where I liked the resulting image. A quick way to do it is by taking a clean reference of yourself and just outline the most basic features using 2 colors (black & white) to start. 1. Outline the shape of your head with ears. 2. Fill in your most prominant facial features (eyes, mouth, nose) 3. Fill in the details as best you can given the alloted space you have to work with. It's not that difficult, a little daunting the first time around but it's really just an over-simplified drawing. If you've created system icons this might be easier for you. Another way to go about this would be to take your photo reference, and trim it down to equally sided lengths in whatever applications you're working in (ie: 640x640). Then slowly stepping it down while at the same time durring each step, running down the color count. When you reach 32x32 most of the finer details will be washed out and the image will look pretty ugly, but you should have a basic enough image to work with and restore the details you need. hope that helps a bit.

a_magical_me

Other people were talking about this recently, too.

strawberries

many thanks lech for the guidance. I have used photoshop fo rmany years, but never ever designed anything as small as this before. I now have my original icon up at my website (john lennon)........the original is around 90 by 90 pixels, and was used for years in a discussion forum. But when I take it down to 32 to 32, it looks crap. I will have to toy more with it. Thanks Magical one for that great link. I have just started to read it. I saw a great little program called pixen mentioned in one of the links off the thread......but then was sad to find that the software was only for the Mac. I will have to read some more. Great tips folks..many thanks for the heads up....best wishes.

Jazzman

Tnx for the comment stawberries :) Wow, the first official discussion with my name in it :P /me thanks his groupies :D

strawberries

welcome Jazzman! By the way, did you get my email? (sent to msn account)