Welcome to your third year at the Prestigious Signature School. Here we start to get into some more
complex techniques, and you will find yourself challenged. You are already half way through.
Keep going, and you will be able to achieve anything!
The topics covered in this year are Transitions + Flow, Alt-Spacing, Advanced Shadind,
Space + Design, Unsymmetrical Signatures, Strikethroughs, and Style.
What is Alt-Spacing you ask. Just pressing the spacebar a bunch of times? NO! Alt spacing is using spaces and soft hyphens - alt 0173. For each period you take away you add a space and a soft hyphen. Now you could replace the periods one at a time, but that takes much too long. Here is the easy way to do it. Copy your signature into notepad. Press ctrl + H. In the find what box put a period. In the replace with box put a space then a soft hyphen. Then click replace all. Copy the now alt spaced sig into the RSF relpy box and BAM!!! you've got yourself a nice alt spaced signature. Note alt-spacing only works for IE and GC. For GC their needs to be a symbol(s) in front of the spaces for it to work.
This is where shading goes professional. Advanced shading is a wide variety of different techniques from simple shading, which look much better.
Advanced shading usually goes like this:
;;;;;;;;:;;:;:::::::.::.:…. .. . .
See how I "blended" the characters to make it smooth, and not 3-sided like |;;;;;:::::….|? Just try and gradually ease onto the next character.
This looks very professional and obviously looks much better than normal shading. With advanced shading, there's also a new technique: double shading. This is where you shade from between different waves outward, to the waves. It's hard to explain
Then you'll need to start deleting one period at a time, constantly alternating the side you take it from. (using both delete and backspace helps)
Keep the count of how many you've taken away.
Keep going until a reasonable amount of periods are left (2-4 on each side, 4-8 in total)
In this one, I counted six periods. Now we'll replace those with the same amount of colons ( ::: ) on each side, and an equal or larger amount of semi-colons ( ;;; ) in the middle.
Since you're now shading AWAY from the waves, do this for the top line too. But since there are no waves on the sides of the signature, you'll have to shade outwards.
In order to have a spiffy looking signature it must have a healty amount of space, and a good design. So, basically you don't want it to be too cramped, or too empty. You also will probably not want it to be too simple or it will look boring. You don't want that do you? No! You want your signature to be epic!
¸·*ˆ¨ Unsymmetrical Signatures' ¨ˆ*·¸
'.,¸¸„‹´ ......... ¯¨`ˆ'°º^^^º°'ˆ´¨¯ ......... `›„¸¸,.' c
Unsymmetrical Signatures are signatures with no planning. That doesn't mean the signature will turn out bad though, almost always it will come out as a more 'free hand' signature that regular, mirrored signatures.
Style is the symbol combination, and techniques of an artist. Everyone has their own style. I would advise to not copy other's style. You can get inspiration, but just don't mimic it. When starting out you should experiment with your style, and find something that's comfortable with you. Then you stick with that until you get a little better. Then once you are fairly experienced, branch out and try some new things. Incorporate your new experiments into your style, and tweak it until you have your ultimate matured style that is comfortable for you. Remember your style is what makes you special.
Character Reducing is really simple, but extremely useful. It is switching four periods with an elipsis.
An elipsis looks like 3 periods squished together, but it is the length of four, and is only one character.
The easy way is to copy the signature into notepad. Press Ctrl-H. In the find what box put "...." and in the replace with box put "…" Then click replace all.
