Well now, how old do you feel? It's 5 years to the day since this group first opened its doors.

Let's go on a journey through time.

This is the first and original Silver Spoon group banner. arcum42 originally found the image, but I don't know who the artist was and their DeviantArt account no longer appears to exist. Possibly arcum42 might have the only copy of this image left in existence at this point.

This image served very well for a number of reasons: firstly, Silver Spoon is lying down in a very banner-dimensionally-convenient orientation already, so I hardly needed to do anything with it. The only real change I made was the addition of the relaxing blue gradient behind Silver Spoon, which again was very easy because the image had a monocolored background.

I liked the symmetry that this banner had with the (then) Diamond Cutters banner, since I've always seen Silver and Diamond as sort of representing ice and fire, and I liked the notion that the Silver Spoon group was the more sedate sister of the Diamond Cutters where everyone could chill and everything's cool and the proprietor only very occasionally gets drunk and thinks it's a good idea to start telling everyone how much he loves them. This banner stood for a good year or two.

In mid-2015-ish I think, we upgraded to this banner, designed in a joint effort between arcum42 and Elric of Melnipony. Together they pretty much solidified the horizontal-spoon design that's still in use today, along with the concept of having Spoony in the spoon bowl (doing her adorable pronk from "Twilight Time"). The colors were much better on this one, too, the purple matching Silver's eyes and just being generally more thematic.

This inverted Spoon banner reflected my inner turmoil at the momentous revelations of "Crusaders of the Lost Mark".

Because the new banner looked so classy, I naturally had the desire to do silly things to it, and Halloween of 2015 provided me with a good excuse. I disassembled the existing banner to produce this concept, but didn't really like how it turned out.

Eventually I realized that I could do a fun Halloween twist on the existing banner by replacing the spoon with something suitably infernal, and tweaking the colors.

In 2016 I found a Valentines image of Silver Spoon kissing Twist. This affirmation of my OTP was so unexpected, and the image so conveniently editable, that I couldn't resist putting it up in the banner. By this point, I had pretty much completely taken apart arcum42 and Elric's design, right down to replacing the gradient background with one that looked the same, and digitally editing pronking Silver out of the spoon.

Shortly after the above successful banner subversion, arcum42 redesigned the banner again, giving it the modern typeface that we use today. (Apparently this was just because he didn't know what font Elric originally used, but I think his choice works really well, a perfect blend of modern and elegant). Faithful to a point, he even recreated the Silver/Twist portion and improved it, adding lenses to the glasses and everything.

At this point, I asked arcum42 to furnish me with the source files so that I could make my own modifications without having to tear the image apart. He agreed.

This was all happening at around the time we hit 500 members, so arcum42 gave us this celebratory modification of the banner for the milestone, featuring the glasses-filly-trifecta of Silver Spoon, Twist, and Zippoorwhill.

Little did he know that the gates to madness were now open.

Since I didn't want to make any imposition on the group, I knew I needed to replace the Silvertwist version of the banner. Don't wanna upset them chicken soup folk, y'know. So I sought to find something else - something that nobody could object to. I therefore decided to ship Silvy with the only filly who could ever meet the Silver standard.

To make the duplicate Spoon, I did some colorization of Twist's body, then a whole bunch of manipulations to superimpose a copy of the existing Spoon onto it. I think it turned out pretty well.

Another play on Silver's name, this time for a silly April Fools joke that probably nobody got.

With the precedent now established, I continued the "Silver making out" joke by partnering her with the only other thing worthy of her love.

The episode "The Saddle Row Review" aired around mid-2016, and how could I not celebrate a filly who appreciates the value of spoons, right? I borrowed this vector of Plaid Stripes and did a bunch of reconstructive surgery to digitally insert her into the banner, which I also made more garish for the occasion.

At this point I'd realized that the makeout pose could also be used for playing instruments, and the Crystal Flugelhorn seemed to fit just right. Since it looked a bit dull against the purple background, I decided to go whole hog and just make the whole banner music-themed. But, you know, classy as well.

Okay so now by this point I was trying to think of the most ridiculous thing possible to ship Silvy with, which is how this happened. Although that said, I've learned never to underestimate shippers.

I abandoned the "Silver Spoon makes out with something" gag at this point and instead decided to continue the video gaming theme, since, y'know, people like video games and I played one once. This was around the time of the No Man's Sky controversy, so that's the theme I tried to go for. The original image was a cropped screencap from "On Your Marks" where Apple Bloom is singing on the bridge; I did a bit of color manipulation to give it a slightly alien palette, and replaced AB with a silhouette of Silver.

This was a friendly jab at our neighbors The Diamond Cutters for Halloween 2016. Went through a few minimalist iterations before I decided on this creepy blood-on-the-wall look.

The Silver Spoon here is actually Equalized Silver Spoon, who had just the right pose I was looking for. I unequalized her and crazied her up a bit.

Continuing the video gaming theme further, I went with something closer to my heart. I'm a huge terminal nerd and love classic green-screen displays, so I overlaid a few different effects here to try to get a semi-authentic CRT look.

Oh, and Silver Spoon is in this banner if you look closely; she's in the rightmost room waiting for Diamond Tiara.

I think I didn't end up using this one. This would have been an Xmas banner for 2016 otherwise. Okay, this is the last makeout one, I swear

Finally returning to the more traditional spoon layout, this was the Xmas 2016 banner. I made the daytime one first but decided a nighttime version would look better. The dress is Silver's flag-carrying ceremony dress from "Flight To The Finish", but I gave it some festive coloring and colored sparkles to give it a Christmas-tree sort of look. You can see how much Silvy approves of it.

I decided to quit making the banner change a regular thing at this point, but I still wanted to give the look an update for 2017. I wanted something a bit energized and dramatic, so I tried for a backlit/eclipsed sort of look, and after some experimentation came up with this. I rather liked how the warm glow mixes with the classic purple. I added some shine and a bit of lens flare too because it has been scientifically proven that all images are 258% better with lens flares.

And that's the banner we're still using today! But we're not done...

Okay so at this point we're in 2017, and like a lot of Fimfiction groups, it's pretty dead and I figure nobody's probably paying any attention to the banner any more. So, I decided to mess with it a bit, because I just can't leave things alone.

Since I like retro/glitch art, I figured I'd try glitching up the banner a bit. It was sort of a metaphor for my feelings about the slow decay of Fimfiction. Anyway I thought it was an interesting look, so I kept it for a while.

Okay, I lied, there was one more banner change. For April Fools 2017 I did the banner in the style of a crap Commodore 64 game.

I gradually added more glitch until it got to this point. Then, in what must surely have been be a maneuver of Machiavellian brilliance on SweetAI Belle's part, she recruited me to The Writer's Group and gave the group a nice shout-out... which made me realize "oh damn, I'd better make the banner not look like crap". XD Thus the banner was restored, and that's what we have today!

AND THAT IS THE END OF HISTORY.

Thanks to all of you who've supported the group this past 5 years. You rock.

Yee!

6394867

This is the first and original Silver Spoon group banner.arcum42originally found the image, but I don't know who the artist was and their DeviantArt account no longer appears to exist. Possibly arcum42 might have the only copy of this image left in existence at this point.

Really? That's a shame. handsockz had some great pictures, and they had a do not post up on derpibooru, too, so most of them aren't there. Ah well.

Nice retrospective on the banners, though I wince a little looking at a line or two on that spoon in some of them. I think I redrew that line later...

--arcum42

6394867
Damn, I remember most of those banners (but then, the group is maybe a month older than my account).

6394941
Oh, it was Handsockz? Aw, damn, they did some super spoony arts back in the day. I assumed they were still around.

6394948
Yeah, I know what you mean. Took a look and handsockz tumblers were down, no deviantant, and only two pictures on derpibooru, since the do not post was for anyone other than the artist posting them.

There do appear to be about a dozen pictures on e621, mind, including one silver spoon one. e621 tends to be fairly nsfw, for anyone looking, though. (Though those particular pictures weren't, IIRC.)

--arcum42

Someone willing to make a collage of spoonbanners for a computer background? I was only inducted into Spoonism a year or two ago, and this is a great place that's given me some hecking epic stories to read. Think I'll do some anniversary folder-diving.

How you make the banners

6395050
The power of GIMP!

6395090
Ok good to know

These are so great though! It's actually weird how many of them I remember seeing. Though I never saw it before, I really like the commodore 64 one for some reason! Anyways, happy anniversary Spoon Club!

What beautiful banners that you made. I will check out your fics to see if they are as good.