There's a lot of things to cover when it comes to coloring, but I generally follow a few rules to make hovers look good;

a. always have a focus on the hover. 200x300 isn't very big, so you need to know what you want to convey in the hover. If you want the focus to be on the face, make sure that around half the hover is showing only the face. If you want to show a certain part, always make sure it either ends up in the center/close to the center, or takes up most of the hover.

b. never ever use high contrast when coloring. You want to show a nicely colored picture, so never overdose on the contrast of the picture. You want to fade out the shadows a bit, and lower the pure whites of the image. I highly recommend using "levels" instead of "curves" in photoshop to do so because it's more straightforward.

c. saturated colors are okay, bright colors are not. What makes a coloring of an image too bright? Comparison.

When you color your hover, keep in mind that everyone will be inevitably looking at your hover as a whole. That means, if you put #000000 next to a neon color, you're making the neon color significantly more prominent, which is a huge no, if you want pleasing colors. What about saturated colors? Those are fine if they complement each other, which means, I can turn on the saturation a bit more for a graphic that has brown, red, and orange tones, compared to turning up saturation for a graphic that has black, green, and red, because it will hurt people's eyes.

d. use contrast smartly. Take Aquila's hover as an example; both the hands are positioned around the pink bubble poodle(?), and that is located around the center of the graphic, with the face taking up most of the hover. However, because her graphic has a lower contrast, and a softer coloring, I will inevitably focus on the face/poodle instead of being drawn to a certain aspect or feeling like my eyes hurt. When you want your whole graphic to be viewed as how it is, never use high contrast; when you have a focus point on your graphic, dial up the contrast.

e. tones. When you want to add a border to the graphic, for example, consider what kind of effect you're going for. For example, aff buttons often have a prominent black border surrounding them with small text that too, has an outline. Why do they use a very black border instead of going for a complement like brown, if the aff button has reddish hues? That's because as an aff button, you want to outline the button and make sure people see the text. However, that wouldn't work for a hover, because the hover is big enough to be looked at, so in that case, you want to pick a color like brown, to complement reddish hues, instead of direct black. The bigger the graphic, the less likely you should be using very contrasting tones.

If you want to underscore the paleness of a graphic, add black to it. When you wan to underscore the darkness of a graphic, add light gray. However, the opposite is true; to make a bright graphic paler, add white and vice versa.

f. when you do icons, always make sure you never have the person too small in the picture. I've seen icons of people with their torso inside, and it's not a good icon if you want the focus to be on the face. If you want to make icons, you want to make sure the "vibe" you want to convey is in there. When you want to convey a character that is badass, look for red and black. When you want to convey a softness, duplicate the layer, lower the contrast of both layers, and then set the top layer to guassian blur, 0.3. Lower opacity/use soft light. Use gradients (soft light) as well, they can be helpful.

g. if you have difficulties coloring an icon from scratch, use psd colorings from deviantart, this is a lot of what I did when I'm inexperienced with photoshop setting, because it allows me to open the psd file in photoshop and just drag the layers to my graphic. I can also delete the settings or play around to see what I like, and combine it with other colorings.

h. icons/hovers are extremely different from banners. The former has limited space to work with, so you should either have a focus, or simpler images, instead of overly complex ones. If a hover/icon has too many things going on, I would just scroll past them instead of looking at them. However, when it comes to banner, because you have more space to work with, you can actually afford more complexity within the designs because people will look at them anyways just from their size.

This is all I have for now; since this thread is mainly about coloring and hover/icons, I'll expand more of that- though, Aquila/Selkie/Leap are the people to go to instead of me tbh just because I kind of suck at those too. I know a bit more about graphics, and I can share tips for those if you want! I'll be back to add more later.

hi punki ! Really sorry for this late gift- but I read that you like haikyuu, and you wanted a signature, so I thought it might be appropriate to give you one with a raven on it! I really hope you like it, and merry christmas!




also, kappaccino , thank you so, so much for the gorgeous icons and template. I absolutely love them, and I will definitely be using them. Merry christmas to you too <3

When someone actually tells me that the site skin/concept makes them want to write. I often spend weeks or even months designing skins and trashing out so many old designs, and muse is something extremely fickle for most RPers I know, including me. Beautiful cinematography is one, and likely the only thing that really inspires me to write, so being told that my designs actually makes people want to write is a compliment that genuinely makes me happy. This goes for templates or writings or graphics- just being told that something I made makes people actually want to use/write/do something is the most touching thing I've ever heard, because it feels like an ultimate testament to a work that I've slaved and fretted over for a long time.