SUBMISSION THREAD

In celebration of Valentine's Day coming up, we're interested in having GameSpotters create e-cards for everyone. The idea is to start this early and then in a couple of days prior to V-Day we'll share some code on how you can share these e-cards with other GameSpot users via private messages or by adding the e-card in blog for all of your tracked GameSpot users.

So, here's how we'll use this thread as a workshop (no submissions get added to this thread).

- For those of you who love Valentine's day try to keep the text friendly (humor is good too) if you are using bright red, pink or other pastel themes. Have some kind of text about Happy Valentine's Day, or what you might see on the candy hearts or any other kind of game related verbiage.

- For those who are loathers about v-day, you can defintely create a more dark side to the Valentine's day, centered around the characters or villains, but keep pink and pastel colors out of color theme. My suggestion should be to keep the deeper colors like black, grey, deep marroons/ deep brick reds, other dark red colors) or dark green, dark brown, and dark blue, keep it dark in nature. Try not to be too cruel on what the text says, but feel free to be sarcastic if desired. Just make sure you are not directing the message agains the user but more about the game character might have said for being evil. For instance, you might use happy not-so-valentine's day, but don't have any hate or trolling terms directed towards others.

- Images need to be uploaded in GameSpot's gallery to make it easier to share once V-day arrives. I'll share the .html code on how to share via a blog or PM in the coming weeks. You can definitely upload the image to your image uploader provider as a secondary option, but any e-card submissions posted in the submission thread need to be the gamespot image url. Note: GameSpot image galleries can take 20 mins to display in your gallery.

- Images need to be jpg/jpeg format.

- Dimensions will be quite important for this activity because some people might want to share their e-cards via private messages. Understanding that the pm box is about 782 x 556, all e-cards should be 650 x 250 maximum. You can make the e-card much smaller, but try to keep in mind that people will have to scroll to check out their e-card, which won't be too fun if they receive a long e-card via private message. I highly suggest that you send your e-card to yourself to see how it looks before submitting it.

- The Valentines e-card should be created by you, and not taken from another website.

- You can create as many e-card images as you would like!

If you have more ideas to share with everyone such as how to create an e-card or if you have any request for the creative GameSpotters, feel free to use this thread. The submission thread should NOT have any requests posted in it.

Other ideas:

- If you are an avid poster for a certain forum, why not create an e-card that includes lingo mainly used in this forum?
- Not all e-cards need to have characters. Why not have a weapon, scenery in the game, or any other object you love in a game while making it romantic or if you are a humbug, not-so-romantic?
- Have anything the GameSpot Editors have done that you can tie in with an e-card? Maybe kevin eating a hat? or Chris doing something silly?

Workshop activity ends on February 10th.

UPDATE: Workshop participation emblem granted to those who participate. Please ask for help if you are 'new' to image creating.

SUBMISSION THREAD

Aww, that's a cute e-card, wolf!

We plan to have a participation emblem for this! What does a participation emblem mean? It means everyone who submits their e-card is granted the sweet workshop e-card emblem!

Therefore, if anyone is good at image creation, would you share some tips on how to create an image for those who are unaware?

Simple tips about how to overlay text, how to crop (quite important), how to re-size, and maybe even how to take screenshots of favorite areas ingame, or anything will do a great deal. Also, any freeware or trials of image softwares would help. I know the limitations of microsoft's paint, but I have tried GIMP, which wasn't too bad for being a free image software to crop and such.

Let's help those who don't know how to create an e-card while allowing them not only to receive an emblem, but also feel proud of creating their first e-card this year!

If I get some time later today I'll do my best to have something about how in the weekly community report's tip of the week.

[QUOTE="Teekal"]

I didn't realize you were an admin Jody, I think you're the first I've seen on the forums. :P[/QUOTE] Well, don't allow the admin tag scare you. I'm sweet as a button! :) In fact, nobody has anything to say bad about me..... *wicked grin*. :)

I love Adobe Photoshop but it's quite pricey for a newbie, so a trial offer is quite helpful.
Thanks for the video tutorials and tips. I think I'll start with yours in this week's tip and then expand to other programs in future tips each week.

Haha, danutz made a cute one with a rabbid and a rabbit.