Avatar & Sig Shops
From MTG Salvation Wiki
The Avatar & Sig Shops forum is the place members go to get their avatars and signature banners created or updated. Many members skilled at designing these have set up "shops" here where they accept requests for graphics. These requests are completed free of charge, although most shops have various rules about who can post requests.
The forum is moderated by Le_Gambit. Previous moderators of the Avatar & Sig Shop forum include Craven, Erasmus, Nex3, and Alex+.
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[edit] Weekly Contest
The weekly contest is an avatar and banner contest located in a subforum of the same name. It offers graphic artists the chance to throw their work up in competition with each other. The contest is currently led by Le_Gambit.
[edit] The structure
Each week, the leader of the contest chooses a theme and a medium, and the artists create art that has to do with that theme. Most often, the medium is just banners, but occasionally artists are asked to create avatars, wallpapers, or something even more unusual. After a week, a voting thread is put up and the general public is allowed to vote for their three favorite pieces of art for the next week. After that, the winner is decided.
[edit] History
The Weekly Contest was originally started by Omen, but was quickly co-opted by Alex+. However, after about 5 weeks, he found he didn't have enough time nor inspiration to continue, and after a bit of juggling, the responsibility landed with De Banaan (then Noobie-T). After several weeks, De Banaan gained moderator-like priviledges such as stickying threads and giving warnings in the Weekly Contest subforum to allow him to better manage the contests. Le_Gambit now manages and runs the Weekly Contest.
[edit] Avatar and Sig Fads
Occasionally, a sig or avatar artist will come up with an idea that the general forum population likes a lot. When this happens, many requests begin to come in to all shops for signatures using that idea, and a fad is started.
[edit] Guild banners
Probably the most pronounced fad, guild banners began with a banner that Xander made for himself. He later made different versions of it for each of his fellow members in House Dimir. It soon caught fire among the general population of 'Salvation, particularly in the other guild clans. The artists at Æther in particular made many guild banners, occasionally modifying the basic format in various ways, including the advent of guild avatars.
[edit] Guild avatars
Created by Topher in the wake of the huge popularity of the Guild Banners, these avatars are essentially the same thing in 100x100, sometimes animated form. The prototype can be seen here.
[edit] Snowy avatars
During 'Salvation's first Christmas, many people decided they wanted something fitting for the season. For most people, this meant putting snowfall in the background of another image, usually of a card, thus creating a snowy avatar.
[edit] Blended-Art banners
The fact that these are so consistently popular makes it dubious whether they're actually a fad, but they're certainly a widespread theme. The idea behind these is to simply take various pieces of artwork from cards, or perhaps other subject matter, and use various graphical tools to smoothly blend them together. This is a very handy format, because it ends up with a nice, smooth-looking result and allows people to include a reasonable large group of cards in the banner, and thus represent a deck they are playing.
[edit] Stickied Shops
On April 1st, 2007, Erasmus and Craven changed the layout of the Avatar & Sig Shops forum to include a new subforum. With this, shops are no longer stickied. The shops currently open are:
