Yes, I know that it's a huge departure from the design language that I've been using for about one and a half years, not to mention the eerie similarities with the "flattened" trend that's been making rounds since around 2012 or so, but it's not November yet, and I could still make changes as I'd like.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure this is actually the most heavily designed avatar that I've ever made, 'cause all of my previous ones are basically just me messing around with settings and tools, while this one I literally went as far as pixel counting to get the lines in the right place.

Anyways, I decided to make this because of how repetitive my old avatars have been in the past. I was pretty much ready last month to drop the wordart and streamers that dominated my avatar for the past year or so, so instead I went with a heavily simplified light silhouette against a plain black background.

You likey?

One last thing: This group kinda sorta seems a bit... dead.

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Seems like the text'll end up hard to read once it's at smaller avatar size. Colors and contrast are good, tho'.

--Sweetie Belle

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Good point. While laying it out I created a separate layer for every element of the image, so all I have to do is delete or maybe resize and recolor the text and it'd be fixed.

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That's always a good idea. My usual avatar probably has a couple dozen layers, so I can mess with it however I want. (Though my current avatar is just a quick Halloween one, so I just did a crop and rescale of an existing picture.)

You could probably also crop some of the black around it out to give the text more space, too. Or you could get rid of the text, and maybe do a T in the center. You can always have a different looking larger copy for places that aren't gonna be shrunk down.

But yeah, one thing with avatars is you are gonna see them at 128x128 at some point (you'll even see it at 96x96 in one spot, I think), so while you should work on it a lot bigger than that, it's a good idea to grab a copy and see what it looks like scaled down (as long as you make sure you're working on a copy and not the original, anyways.)

I tend to actually upload my avatars at 512x512, though, so that places that show bigger copies will look better.

--Sweetie Belle

Yeah. I used a 2048x2048 canvas, but the way I partitioned out the space makes the total area that consists of the actual avatar around 512x512 based off of what the guide rulers say. I'll probably go back and scale it up or something tomorrow.

I was about to analyze, but I see you already made a new version, and I like that one a lot better, so I think I will do the comparison ones on that thread. I'll probably do that tomorrow.

As far as the group being dead, that depends on when you consider groups to be dead.

If you define it by mod-activity then I do check the site for notifications every few days. though my life has been too busy for me to go out of my way to build on all the foundations I made. I don't even really read the stories here anymore, but I am willing to answer questions about the groups I made when the time comes that someone is actually curious enough to ask.

Still, I could probably be a lot more involved. and when I eventually get a job I'll probably be less free to check on things.

Though I'm definitely not going to delete any of the groups I created.

The most that's gonna happen is that I'll search for mods and maybe even new group owners to hopefully shape things up and encourage community more so than I do, as I don't seem too motivated beyond creating a canvas for an engaged community to grow and thrive and all that.

Even if I don't think it's too necessary, I'd really be happy if someday I can hop on one of the forums to my groups and see that there's an active community talking about the subjects each group is dedicated too.