Okay so, earlier today I needed to make some new tags (pips) for my board. We're a Harry Potter board, and we added Smeltings this year - Dudley Dursley's school - and also a non-canon sister school for it, Marshall, so that we had a place for girls to go as well. I tried out a new design than I usually used for my wizard character tags, thinking that this would set the muggles/non-magical people apart, so that it was easy to see the differences between the two worlds. What I some how, terrifyingly, ended up with...were tags SO pretty that I couldn't...well, I HAD to remake all the rest of them on the board. We have over 100 tags, so this is kind of a time consuming project...but I was so proud of the ones I've already done that I thought I'd show them off to you guys. :] For comparison, here's what some of our tags looked like before: And...here's some from the new set: I am SO proud of them...just a little daunted by how many more I have to make. Luckily I only have two more school ones to make (we have a total of eight schools now that Smeltings & Marshall are open, EESH.) and then it's on to the jobs like Ministry of Magic/etc. :] Pretty please do not take these, I worked very hard on them and would like them to remain unique to my game. Thank you! :]
I love these so much. I'm so excited to see what you do with the Ministry tags because you know I own that place.
Oh, that's really nice, Manda! How did you do the background and shapes? Just brushes? They look really good. I always have problems with pips. Congratulations! My favourite has to be the Beauxbatons one.
Thanks, ladies! I actually did them 100% with fonts. I rarely use brushes because I feel like I don't have as much control over them as I'd like; instead I nab a bunch of "Dingbat" fonts from DaFont.com and adjust the blending options/opacity/etc, rasterize some of the layers so that i can manually edit them/erase stuff, etc. I'm a font geek for sure. I think the only time I use brushes is if I can't find a font for it. EDIT: As a footnote, actually, the original ones there were done with hand-pixeling and brushes; I made them years ago before I discovered the glory of fonts. This new system works much better and faster, those old ones take me 20 mins to make a full one, but these I was able to make 50+ in a matter of hours (And still have maybe..50+ to go >> so it was like weeeeeeeeee.
I like the old ones, but I do quite like the new ones too. But the old ones just remind me of old school Harry Potter roleplaying, lol. <3 I actually had a hunch that it was fonts. I don't know why my mind went there first, but it did, lol. But yey, great job. =D I hope you can get them all done and wow for having that many groups. =o lol Do you have one a group per year and house at each school?
I'm so glad you like them! The old ones..oh my gosh, I've had them so long, it's very hard to see them go. I'm overly sentimental with my graphics. But it was just time for something new With my software, we actually have separate "ranks" and "usergroups," so I only have a few usergroups - Mods, Admins, Active Characters, New Characters (not yet applied), and Canons, so that they can stand out a little. For our tags, we have one for each house of Hogwarts, the other schools just get a plain tag like the ones above and they'll have a second tag (we call them "bars") underneath with their house and year. The other reason I have to create so many is that our board is kinda...the whole world. XD So I have to make Ministry of Magic tags for the UK, America, and other countries (or well, already made!), things like journalism at the Daily Prophet, St Mungos, Azkaban, etc. It's a lot, but I'm nearly halfway done now!
lol I'm the same way, actually. >.< And that's cool - Mine's the same way, except I don't have a lot of tags. I just mean in being the whole world too, lol. <3 But woo, good luck on finishing them all. =D I know huge tasks like that are hard to finish and just tedious, but it's always so worth it in the end, don't you think? <3
lol I know the feeling. Like I always say, you're not a good staff member unless you're a house elf. <3
I'm so happy to see how pips, no matter how small, can have so much work put into them and it SHOWS. Great work manda! I really wish I had enough creativity to come up with those kind of pips. And congratulations on the creativity. When i used to be on MS Paint, all my "brushes" were actually fonts. So great work on still implementing a technique to make an amazing product :]
Very nicely done! I bet they will look great. :D Don't get discouraged by the work. Just think of the end result.
